CCCCC CCcc. 

g CC CCCC C Vi<iC. €j C c 

X <ZC C C C C C <3fCc ( <r: c^ 
O C Co CC C C C C C C CM C*X C 

ccc crcc c c c c c ccc < <j r c 



S9 



j@ 



ccc ccc 
ccc ccc 

iccccC 
c c dec c 

:c cccc 

zee: 



ccc 

:C?c CCC 
<Ccc CSC 

joc esc 



CcCC ! C c c c c c C <3 

ccc c cc c c cc c 

CCClCcCCC cr c 
OClCCC< ccc 
C CCCcCC C cc C 



d ccc ccc C3LCS C« c 

CCCCCCCO: c 



■*> r 'fe''^% '^-%>^% 



<Ooc c 

Ccc cc 

c c cc cc 



I LIB RARY OF CONGRESS,? 

j Say! BTSJc I 

1|UXITED STATES OF AMERICA. 4 



g^-%-^^^^%, ■«,■»><»■*, *> <**<%. 



CC 

cc 



CC CC CC CC ( ^ 






CcH 






CC c c < 

cc c • 

« 

r<^ c c 

jC C ; 

cc c < 



c CjCC 

^ . c d? CJL C 

CcCTC'C CECiCC 

C«"c< C C C C 



^W-Ai®r c.c 



b c Cfc etc <iC : cccc . «:« etc 



£ etc: cgi,cE<Cd" 'Ctcs-c::cSc: ; .c<: 



s&c, cc cccc cc ac cc cstd-cc 

i ccc electee csdccccccc. 

C (ST; CT^CCC* Cc~ ^ ^ ^ rr ' a ^ t 



i! : ccx3x33c ctcotjt clKcc 



7 '■ c c cc<si ccc c 



tc cc 






cc cOC 3| <GC 



ccc 

cc c 

ttcc 

^CC 



cc cc 



cc <M <cc<t j 

<CCC ;^^ 

etc- < 

c 

u: CC i 
:<7T CC <C 

r d c <€ 

cc 






c 



■ 



THE 



Duration and Nature 



OF 



Future Punishment 



y' by 
HENRY CONSTABLE, A.M., 



PREBENDARY OF CORK. 



REPRINTED FROM THE SECOND LONDON EDITION. 



£ NEW HAVEN, CONN.: 
CHARLES C. CHATFIELD & CO. 
1872. 




E> 



C 






CONTENTS. 



CHAP. PAGE. 

Explanatory Preface i 

I. Future Punishment is Eternal ... 1 

II. Eternal Death .3 

III. Testimony of the Old Testament . . 10 

IY. Testimony of the New Testament . . .14 

V. The Illustrations of Scripture . . . 26 

VI. Examination of Particular Texts . . .28 

VII. Distinctions in Future Punishment . . 35 

VIII. The Diyine Justice 39 

IX. Origin, Duration, and End of Eyil . . 43 

X. Rise of the Theory of Eternal Life in Hell 53 

XL Rise of the Theory of Universal Restoration 59 

XII. Conclusion 64 



INTRODUCTION. 



To the American Reader: 

Taught from childhood, as doubtless you also have been, that all 
souls are possessed of immortality, and that, for the wicked ones, hell is a 
place of eternal torment, I ever accepted the belief, and for years have 
earnestly enforced it upon others. But, during a recent journey in Eurppe, 
my faith in that doctrine was staggered by the sight of the multitudes there, 
and at the thought of the outlying millions still of Asia and Africa, all 
hurrying on to God's tribunal. Can it be, that in their heedlessness and 
ignorance, or in their delusive strivings after pardon, they are to meet a 
doom such as, in its infinity of torture, the human mind could neither con- 
ceive nor endure the thought ? I had learned to know somewhat of the love 
of God, the Creator and upholder of these lost millions ; how could I 
reconcile that with the accepted doctrine of unending suffering? I did try, 
faithfully ; even, in these struggles of the mind, writing home to a doubting 
Christian brother to confirm him in this belief, which I feared was slipping 
from under me. 

Some months afterwards, a clergyman in London put into my hands 
the pamphlet I here offer re-printed, stating its doctrines. I replied, " Most 
happy would I be to accept it, if I could : but is it the doctrine of the 
Bible ?" Carefully I read it over. The wicked, after the final judgment, 
ase to be literally destroyed by the fiat of Him who, Christ forewarns us, " is 
able to destroy both soul and body in hell" Upon their final death we can 
look with comparative calmness, though we cannot upon their protracted 
life in suffering. With them, in the same lake of fire, are destroyed the devil 
and his angels ; and this consequence of sin remains an everlasting punish- 
ment, an abiding testimony to all ages of the fearfulness of sin, and so f&? 
a guarantee that God's universe shall henceforth remain as thus renovated, 
forever pure and holy. Nor does such a fate rob retributive justice of its 
peculiar terrors ; for, as there is variety here in the mode of our mortal 
death, so may we believe of the second death. The impenitent heathen, 
ignorant of redeeming love, speedily perish, while a longer, more fearful 
doom, the many stripes of those " who knew and did not," awaits the 
obstinate rejectors of God's infinite grace. 



ii I-, ,n. 

This view of the futur -edly derived from the word of God, I 

carefully and prayerfully compared with the Scripture record. And there. 
as I believe, I found it ; and so plainly set forth, I could but wonder that I 
had so long overlooked it. I had been blinded, as I believe we all are, by 
the idea that immortality must be a necessary attribute of every soul, and so 
the truth had heretofore lain concealed. But with the sweeping away of 
that error, a clearer light is shed upon the Holy Word itself, which I can 
now understand as it was written, not as it is explained for me by com. 
mentators. "When Christ says, "I give unto them eternal life," and, " He 
that believeth on the Son hath everlasting life," He means simply just what 
He says. He gives us life, a new life not possessed before, which, dating from 
the " new birth," runs on for a while, coexistent with, and yet not terminate I 
with, our mortal life, — it is a literal, eternal life. Christ uses not the word in 
a technical "Biblical sense," so-called ; he is not speaking for the Doctors of 
Theology, but so that we, the common people, may understand and hear 
him gladly. Again, when He says, " He that believeth not the Son shall not 
see life," he means such shall not see this life of eternity. So that, " The 
wages of sin IS death, the gift of God IS eternal life." l 

Rejecting the traditional dogma of the soul's essential immortality, de- 
nied, it would seem, if anything can be, in the Bible, 2 our doubts and 
difficulties vanish with it. The justice of God, and the question of the 
origin and end of evil, no longer now need the unsatisfactory explanations 
of Theologic essayists — the difficulties were but of our own creation. And 
now, I offer to you, my Christian brother, this little pamphlet, which has 
brought to me so much of joy and peace : peace in the thought of the final 
and complete extirpation of evil from God's universe, though it be with the 
total destruction of the obstinate agents of evil ; joy, in its vindication of 
the power, justice and goodness of our Heavenly Father. Will you not, for 
the truth's sake, thoughtfully study its presentation of doctrine in the light 
of God's authoritative record? Think not of it as a willful attempt to 
" pervert the right ways of the Lord." The simple question is — Is it, or is 
it not, according to God's Holy "Word ? You will perceive that this doctrine 
establishes that gradation in future punishment which is taught by Revela- 
tion and reason, in this differing from the views of those Annihilationists, 
(so-called.) who hold to the immediate destruction of evil doers. 

A candid, not dogmatic and bitter, review of the grounds of our belief 

:ding future punishment is greatly needed at the present day. I BD4 ak 

for the laymi f them, and I know also, that not a few of our 

and thoughtful i :i have serious difficulties on this point 

wn preacher and Bible expositor, 

l V.<-u.:.- I Tim. \i. 10 

:. ii. T. 



Introduction. iii 

Rev. Albert Barnes. Speaking of sins entrance into tlie world, and of that 
eternity of suffering he felt constrained to teach, he declares : 

" These are real, not imaginary difficulties. * * I confess, for one, I feel them, 
and feel them the more sensibly and powerfully the more I look at them, and the longer I 
live. * * I do not know that I have a ray of light on this subject, which I had not 
when the subject first flashed across my soul. I have read, to some extent, what wise and 
good men have written. I have looked at their various theories and explanations. I have 
endeavored to weigh their arguments, for my whole soul pants for light and relief on these 
questions. But I get neither ; and in the distress and anguish of my own spirit, I confess 
that I see no light whatever. I see not one ray to disclose to me the reason why sin came 
into the world ; why the earth is strewed with the dying and the dead, and why man must 
suffer to all eternity. I have never seen a particle of light thrown on these subjects that 
has given a moment's ease to my tortured mind. * * It is all dark — dark — dark, to 
my soul, and I cannot disguise it." * 

" In the midst of this gloom," as he styles it, Mr. Barnes comforts him- 
self with the belief that, it must be that the Judge of all the earth will do 
right, though appearances are so much against it ; it seeming never to occur 
to him that his own theology, and not the revealed truth, is here at fault. 
Others of our religious teachers live on in silence, seeking relief from, 
these felt difficulties in a smothered hope in universal salvation, or at least 
a final restoration of the wicked, or else they fancy a probation beyond the 
grave : in either case failing to give decided utterance of that future woe, so 
solemnly enforced by the Great Preacher. 

But so far from any tendency to affiliation with Universalists, as in- 
sinuated by a recent theological reviewer, 2 this doctrine is diametrically 
opposed to theirs, more so than is the popular theoiy which agrees with 
Universalism, in upholding the error common to both, that " every soul is 
immortal." That dogma, if you will but recognise it, is the original lie of 
our sinful world. It was first uttered in Eden when Satan declared to our 
tempted parents, " Ye shall not surely die ;" in the same words is it repeated 
by the Universalist of our day ; and it is repeated still, though it be unwit- 
tingly and in other words, by every orthodox religious teacher, when he 
proclaims, " Ye shall live forever in your sins ! " Against both these forms 
of deception our doctrine opposes itself alike, declaring in the words of the 
Master, " Ye shall die in your sins, if ye believe not on the Son of God." 3 
"What possibility for Universal Salvation, what hope for a future pardon, 
w T hen the soul is forever literally destroyed ? It w T as to take away this last 
refuge of the unregenerate soul, that our gracious Lord so fully and un- 
equivocally foretells everlasting punishment — eternal death ! And yet in 
spite of all, the arch-deceiver has for centuries pursuaded the Christian 
Church that his lie was not so far from truth ; that though all men die out 

1 Practical Sermons by Albert Barnes, (Lindsay & Blakiston, Phila: 1860.) first 
published, 1841. 

2 Life and Death Eternal, by S. C. Bartlett, D.D. 2 John viii. 24. 

2 



j v /;/ tra 1 

of this world, yet they arc all hereafter to live to all eternity. And out of 
this again has grown that Romish falsehood of purgatory. Sad that our 
Protestant forefathers, when they took their stand upon the Bible, and re- 
jected the many errors of a corrupted church, had not aLo recognized 
and rejected this early device of the Old Serpent ! That immortality thus 
asserted of all men, our doctrine restricts to those to whom Christ gives it : 
while that scripture-promised restitution of all things, the seeming glory of 
Universalism, but the stumbling block of the popular theory, it makes 
evident as fully accomplished in the final destruction of all evil doers. 

In this connection, and in cheering contrast to those sad words of the 
Philadelphia divine, let me quote from the author of this pamphlet, in his 
preface : 

"For myself, I cannot express my sense of the value I place on the view I now seek to 
impress on others. It has for me thrown a light on God's character, and God's word, and 
the future of His world, which I once thought I should never have seen 0:1 this side of the 
grave. It has not removed the wholesome and necessary tenors of the Lord from the mind, 
but it has clothed GoBwith a loveliness which makes Ilim, and the Eternal Son who repre- 
sents illim to man, incalculably more attractive. I am no longer looking for shifts to 
excuse his conduct in my own eyes and those of others, and forced to feci that here at least 
I could never find one to answer my object. I can look at all that He has done, and all lie 
tells me He will hereafter do, and, scanning it closely, and examining it even where it ha* 
most of awe and severity, exclaim with ail my heart and with all my understanding — ** Just 
and true are Thy ways, thou King of Saints. "' 

111 conclusion, 1 may state that this question of Future Punishment, 
has been of late freely discussed in the Religious Magazines of England ; 
and I am informed that a large proportion of the intelligent and devout 
English clergymen, of all denominations, accept the truth of the views 
herein stated. The agitation on this subject has not reached our shores, 
at least not fully as yet, but it must be met ; and the sooner the truth pre- 
vails the better, for the glory of God, and for our common Christianity. 

C. L. IVES. 

New Hav;-:n. Conn., February. 1371. 



THE 



DURATION AND NATURE 



OP 



FUTURE PUNISHMENT. 



CHAPTER I 

FUTURE PUNISHMENT IS ETERNAL. 

Future Punishment for the sins of the present life is universally 
allowed to be taught in Scripture; but, with respect to its 
nature and duration, very opposite opinions have been and are 
maintained, as being each of them the doctrine of God's Word. 
We speak only of punishment to be inflicted subsequent to the 
Judgment. With the condition of the soul in its separate state 
in Hades we have here nothing; to do. 

There are three main opinions relative to this punishment. 
One of these makes it to be essentially of a purgative nature, 
to be temporary in its duration, and to have as its issue the 
restoration of all to God's favor and eternal happiness. This 
was the opinion of Origen. The second is that which has long 
been most commonly received. It makes punishment to be 
eternal in its duration, and supposes it to consist in an eternal 
life spent in misery and pain. This was the theory of Augus- 
tine. According to the third opinion, punishment is also eter- 
nal, but death, i. e. the loss of life, is its essence, attended 
and preceded by such various degrees of pain as a just and 
merciful God, for wise reasons, sees fit to inflict. The third 
of these opinions is the one here maintained. Its establishment 
will of course set aside the others. Its eternal duration will 
overthrow that of Origen; its character, involving a state of 
death, will overthrow alike that of Origen and Augustine. We 



2 Future JPunishment is Hkenxal. 

rest its proof on the express, oft-repeated, and harmonious 
testimony of Scripture, and on arguments drawn from that 
character of God which He has given of Himself in His Word. 

"With respect to the eternity of future punishment we will be 
brief. To us it has always appeared that, as clearly as Holy 
Scripture teaches that there will be punishment, with the same 
clearness it teaches that punishment to be eternal — without end. 
We will give the chief grounds on which we rest our opinion. 

In the first place its duration is described in the very same 
terms as the life of the redeemed. 'These,' saith Christ, speak- 
ing of the reprobate, 'shall go away into everlasting pun- 
ishment, but the rio-hteous into life eternal.' 1 Here the same 
Greek word^ is used for the duration of these opposite states. 
If, as almost all allow, it means eternal in the case of the 
righteous, it surely must mean so in that of the wicked. How 
absurd would such a translation as this be — 'These shall go 
away into punishment which is not eternal; but the righteous 
into life which is eternal!' 

Again, our Lord has repeatedly declared that there are per- 
sons who, at no time and under no change of dispensation, shall 
have forgiveness : ' Whosoever speaketh against the Holy 
Ghost, it shall not be forgiven him, neither in this world, neither 
in the world to come.' 3 This is wholly inconsistent with the 
idea that such persons should, after any period of punishment, 
enter into the peace of God. 

What Christ has here said of one class of sinners He has 
said elsewhere in equally strong language of all who reject 
Him : ' He that believeth not the Son shall not see life, but 
the wrath of God abideth on him.' 4 If, after a certain purga- 
tion, such men passed from a state of punishment into one of 
happiness, these words of Christ — we say it with all reverence — 
would not and could not be true ; for such men would see life, on 
such men the wrath of God would not abide. 

Again, there are persons of whom our Lord affirms that it 
would have been better for them if they had not been born. 5 J 
Such an affirmation is incompatible with the idea that they 
should, after a punishment of any conceivable length, enter upon 
the life of bliss. The first moment of release would make 
amends for all past suffering ; throughout eternity they would 
praise God that they had been born. 

i Matt. xxv. 46. aionios. 3 Matt. xii. 31 : Luke xiL 10. 

* John iii. 33. '•> Matt. ssvi. -U , Mark ariy. ii. 



Eternal Death. 3 

For these and other reasons we are persuaded that punish- 
ment will be of an eternal duration. The Judgment once 
passed, God holds out no hope beyond. Man now makes his 
choice of one or other of two conditions, each of which will 
be alike eternal. 



CHAPTER II. 

ETERNAL DEATH. 



In what will the eternal state of the lost consist ? That is now 
our question. We hold that it does not consist in an eternal 
life spent in pain of body, or remorse of mind, but that a state of 
utter death and destruction's that state which abides for ever. 
The length of time which this process of dissolution may 
take, and the degrees of bodily or mental pain which may 
precede and produce it, are questions which we must leave 
to that providence of God which will rule in hell as in heaven. 
One thing, however, we may with certainty gather. It is that 
the process of dissolution will afford scope for that great variety 
of punishment which the reprobate will suffer hereafter, from 
that which in its justice is terrible to that which, with equal 
justice, is scarcely felt at all. 

We need not stop to argue that, between this view of punish- 
ment and that which maintains an eternal existence in pain, 
there is no comparison. The present life shows us this. When 
hope has ceased to cheer its future men willingly lay it aside for 
death ; when pain has made it a weary burden, the friends 
of the sufferer thank God for its termination. ' Better not to be 
than to live in misery,' was the judgment of Sophocles, and 
we ever find the wretched, when suffering has become excessive, 
calling upon death as upon a friend. 1 So the close of each 
agonized life in hell would be longed for there ; would send 
a thrill of relief through the inhabitants of heaven. 2 

It may be well to say a few words on the reasons which have 
from a very ancient period led a majority of Christians, as from 
a period still more ancient they led the majority of the Jewish 
Church, to hold the doctrine of an eternal life of pain, as it 

1 Job ifi. 21 ; Jer. viii. 3 ; Rev. ix. 6. s Cicero, Tusc. Disp. i. 45. 



4 Eternal Death. 

will be requisite to show that one of these reasons is without 
foundation, before we proceed to the establishment of our 
own view. It will be seen that this same reason led another 
class of minds with a like irresistible force to the other prreat 
error here controverted, viz : Universal Restoration. 

Before the preaching of the Gospel the highest order of 
heathen philosophy had framed for its satisfaction a theory 
of the immortality of the soul. While far the greater number 
taught l that death was for all, sooner or later, an eternal sleep, 
there were 'high spirits of old' that strained their eyes to 
see beyond the clouds of time the dawning of immortality. 
Unable, as we are able, to connect it with God as its source, 
and with his promise as our assurance, they framed the idea 
of an immortality self-existing in the soul itself. Plato, in 
his ' Pha?do,' has given us the marvellous reasoning of Socrates, 
and Cicero has exhibited the argument in his ' Tusculan Ques- 
tions.' According to it, the soul is possessed of an inherent im- 
mortality. It is of necessity eternal. It could have no end : 
no death. What was true of one soul was true of all souls 
alike, whether o-ood or bad. Thev must live somewhere, be it in 
Tartarus, or Cocytus, in Pyriphlegethon, or the happy abodes 
of the purified. This sublime philosophical idea passed readily 
and early into the theology of the Christian Church. We find 
it running throughout the reasoning of Athenagoras and Tertul- 
lian, of Origen and Augustine. 2 Heedless of Paul's warning 
voice 3 against philosophy, they became the feeble apes of Plato. 
They applied their theology, as he his philosophy, to all souls 
alike — to those of the reprobate as of the redeemed. They 
tauorht that the life of the former must be as eternal as that 
of the latter. 

A moment's reflection will show us that a dop-ma of this kind 
could not remain idle. It must influence most powerfully in one 
direction or in another this whole question of future punishment. 
It must mould the entire doctrine of the Church upon the sub- 
ject. According as men connected it <vith one truth of Scripture 
or another, it must give rise to two different and opposite schools 
of thought. Connect the immortality of the soul with the Scrip - 

1 Gibbon's 4l Decline and Fall,"' chap. xv. 11. Cicero, Tusc. Disp. i. 31. Justin Martyr. 
Apol. ii. p. 91. Ed. Paris, 1615. 

2 Athenagoras. p. 31 A. 53 D. Edition: Justin Martyr. Paris, 1615. Tertullian, De 
Anima. Paris. 1675; Origen, vol. i. 486 B. ; Vol. ii. 108 C. E. Ed. Kothomagi, 1668; 
Augustine. Civ. Dei, xxi. 3. Antwerp. 1700. 

3 Col. ii. S-, 1 Cor. i. 22, ill, 19; 1 Tim. vi. 28. 



Plato on Immortality. 5 

tural doctrine of the eternity of punishment, and you inevitably 
create the dogma of eternal life in misery, i.e. of Augustine's 
hell. Connect it with the other great truth of Scripture, the 
final extinction of evil and restoration of all things, and you as 
inevitably create Origerfs Universal Restoration. For each of 
these opposing theories there is exactly the same amount of 
proof, viz: Plato's dogma and a dogma of the Bible; and, if 
Plato's dogma could be proved to be a Scriptural doctrine, then 
by every law of logic Scripture would be found supporting two 
distinct and absolutely contradictory theories. 
r - Accordingly, this philosophical idea of Plato is found pervad- 
ing and influencing the interpretation of Scripture from the 
second century down to our own day. The Fathers, as a general 
rule, considered the question of future punishment under the im- 
pression that every soul of man was immortal. It is true, indeed, 
that none of them, unless, perhaps, Origen and a few of his dis- 
ciples, attached to the soul the idea of an essential immortality 
and an existence from all eternity, as Plato did. They generally 
acknowledged it as the creation of God, having a beginning in 
time, and would doubtless have allowed, if asked, that He who 
had given it existence could take that existence away. But in 
supposing that God gave to the soul at its creation an inalien- 
able immortality, i.e. an immortality not affected by any conduct 
upon man's part, of which no creature could deprive it, and of 
which God would not deprive it, they in effect laid down a 
dogma which had the very same influence upon their views of 
future punishment as if they had adopted the dogma of Plato to 
its fullest extent. An immortality that never would be taken 
from the soul, and an immortality that could not be taken from 
it, would have precisely the same bearing upon the future of 
man : in either case man must live on for ever, whether in misery 
or in happiness. In a subsequent chapter we will show the 
actual influence of this dogma upon the doctrine of the Church, 
leading first to Augustine's fearful theory of everlasting misery, 
and then, in the revulsion of human thought from this, to 
Origen's theory of universal restoration. We here merely note 
the fact that the dogma of the inalienable immortality of the 
human soul was from a very early period of the Christian 
Church accepted generally as true. 

Now the immortality of the soul, whether as held by Plato, 
by Origen, or by the Fathers in general, was a mere fancy of the 
human mind. As to any essential immortality which belonged 



6 Eternal Death. 

to it of its own proper ^nature, in all probability there is not a 
single Christian writer or thinker who would be found to main- 
tain it. It was, as Pliny justly called it, a figment ; and even 
Socrates, with all his noble longings, with all his subtle reason- 
ings, seems to have feared that after all his favorite notion was 
no sounder than the figment which the Epicurean contemptuous- 
ly called it. 1 Scripture denies it altogether. An essential im- 
mortality it does not allow to be the attribute of any creature, 
however exalted in its origin. To one Being only — to God — 
does it allow to have life in Himself: of one Being only — God 
— does it allow such an immortality to be an attribute. 2 Here, 
as in everything else, Scripture is the book of the highest reason. 
That which has had a beginning may have an end. That on 
which God has bestowed life He may and can inflict death. The 
highest intelligences as much as the lowest must depend on Him 
for the continuance of their life. Let Him withdraw his sustain- 
ing power and the mighty archangel becomes a thing of nought, 
as completely as the insect which dances in the sunbeams for an 
hour and then passes away for ever. 

The idea that God has bestowed upon men, or upon any part 
of human nature, an inalienable immortality finds just as little 
sanction in the Scriptures. The expression ' immortality of the 
soul,' so common in theology, is not once found in the Bible from 
beginning to end. In vain do men, bent on sustaining a human 
figment, ransack Scripture for some expressions which may be 
tortured into giving it some apparent countenance. The phrase, 
( living soul,' applied to man at his creation, 3 has been by many 
Christian writers, ignorant of Hebrew, supposed to imply such 
an immortality. 4 A slight acquaintance with the original 
language of the Old Testament would have shown these writers, 
ancient and modern, that the very same phrase had been applied 
to the lower creation before it was applied to man. 5 The three- 
fold description of man, as having body, soul and spirit, has 
been by others supposed significant of his inalienable immortal- 
ity. Whatever be meant by this distinction, it cannot in any 
measure support the inference based upon it, as the lower crea- 
tures are allowed in Scripture to be possessed not merely of body 
and soul but of spirit likewise. 6 

i Pliny's Nat. Hist. vii. 5G. " Apology of Socrates," c. 32 and 33. 
2 Johnv. 26; 1 Tim. vi. 16. 3 Gen. ii. 7. 

4 ' Religious Tendencies of the Times,' By James Grant, v. ii,, p. 136. Theophilus of 
Ant. 97 c. Justin Martyr's Works. 

5 Gen. i. 20-21. 6 Gen. vii. 22 ; Eccl. iii. 19-21. 



Immortality of the Soul. 7 

But an inalienable immortality is expressly asserted in Scrip- 
ture not to have been bestowed upon man at his creation. 1 We 
do not deny that man was made in God's image, and that a very 
important part of this resemblance consisted in man's not being 
subject to death as the lower creatures were. Immortality was 
given to man at his creation. This priceless gift was one of the 
gifts which a bountiful Creator bestowed upon a favored crea- 
ture. J3ut it teas alienable. It might be parted with : it might 
be thrown away : it might be lost. So He, the Lawgiver said, 
when in giving immortality He also added the warning, ' in the 
day thou eatest thou shalt die.* What is more, this immortality 
was alienated ; this priceless gift teas throion away and lost. 
Man sinned and lost his immortality. Man made in the image 
of God lost the image. So God said when to fallen Adam He 
declared, 'Dust thou art, and unto dust thou shalt return.' 2 Sin- 
ful man is not by nature immortal but mortal. He has lowered 
himself to the level of the beasts that perish. If immortality is 
to be his again it must be as a gift restored and not inherited. 
It must become his by virtue of some new provision of grace, 
which reinstates him in the place he lost. This icas the Gospel 
of Christ. It was to give the eternal life which man had forfeit- 
ed that He came into the world; but subsequent examination 
will show us that He does not bestow this priceless gift on all, 
but on some only of the fallen race. 3 

Before we proceed to establish our view of future punishment 
by the direct testimony of Scripture, it will be necessary to re- 
move an objection very commonly made to it, and which has 
great force with very many minds. We allow that it has great 
apparent force. It had such with us for many years, and we can- 
not wonder that it has such with others. We are persuaded that 
if this objection is removed the grand objection with many de- 
vout and holy minds will be taken away. The objection is this, 
that iv hat is no longer felt to be punishment by the party who is 
punished is no punishment at all ; that it ceased to be a punish- 
ment the moment it ceased to be sensibly felt. This was one of 
Tertullian's chief reasons for his view of eternal misery. 4 He 
reasoned precisely as those heathen reasoned who, in trying to 
reconcile man to his inevitable fate, tried to reason him into the 
belief that death was no evil. 5 Yet when such men looked on 
into the limitless future, into that endless life which the human 

i Gen. ii. IT. 2 Gen. iii. 19. 3 j hn v. 24, 40. 

4 Tertullian, De Res. xxxv. ; Lucretius, b. iii. 5 Cicero, Tusc. Disp. i. 36. 37. 

3 



5 Eternal Death. 

mind can conceive and long to make its own, they corrected their 
former reasoning and, without the Christians promise of eternal 
life in Christ, called endless death an en U '- Such it is 

e en to him who has ceased to feel the loss of life, and, since the 
life restored to man throngh Christ is an eternal life, it follows 
that its loss, inflicted as a punishment, is also an eternal punish- 
ment. 

And here the first death affords a perfect analogy to the second. 
From the earliest records of our race capital punishment has been 
r ?koned as not only the greatest, but also the most lasting of all 
punishment, and it is only reckoned the greatest because it is the 
m : c : lasting. A flogging inflicted on a petty thief inflicts more 
actual pain than decapitation or hanging inflicts upon a murderer. 
TThy is i: thus reckoned 1 Because it has deprived the sufferer 
of every hour of that life which but for it he would have had. 2 
'tion is supposed co-existent with ike period of his natural 
life, 4 The laws,' says Augustine, ' do not estimate the punish- 
ment of a criminal by the brief period during which he is being 
put to death, but by their removing- him for ever from the com- 
pany of living men.' 3 

The conclusion drawn from this is sometimes sought to be g : t 
rid of by representing the real punishment of death to con sis: 
in its exposing the party put to death to those sufferings which 
are supposed to follow death in the world of spirits. But whether 
such sufferings do or do not at once follow death, it is quite plain 
: such is not the consideration which has impr :pon 

the human mind its abiding sense, that in inflicting death upon 
criminals the greatest and most lasting of punishment has 
inflicted. For this idea has not been confined to Christian na- 
ti : us, or to believers in a future life of rewards and ptinishmeii:-. 
" rat i ted before the time of the Gospel, and by men and 

nations who did not believe in a fature life at all. Herod the 
5a Idncee, Piiny the Epicurean. Confucius, followed in his hopeless 
creed by nearly one-half of the human family, represent this im- 
rcssion of the human mind. 

Xow this is readily applied to the future life and to future 

punishment. The loss of every year of the life which the sinner 

might have had but for his sin is a punishment, and because the 

life is eternal the punishment is eternal also. There is here no 

ining of argument to make out a The argument is one 

»h man's judgment has in every _ approved as just, 

i Cicero, Tnec Bisp. i. -:" 5 Cicero, Toec. Disp i. 34. 3 De Civ. Dei. xri. 11. 



Eternal Death is Eternal Punishment. 9 

and which, as applied to the future punishment of the ungodly, 
is allowed to be just alike by those who believe that it will 
consist in eternal death, and by those who believe that it will 
consist in an eternal life of misery. 1 

And in arguing thus we have confined our attention to the 
parties actually punished, while we have left out of sight the 
grand object of all wise punishment, viz: the lesson taught by it 
to those who have not offended. Now, viewed in this light, 
eternal death inflicted on sinners is eternally felt, and has an 
eternal influence on the parties whom it was intended principally 
to affect. The actual sinner suffered as he deserved — if not less, 
certainly not more. His death, then, intervenes to afford its 
eternal lesson to all future times. They who rejoice in immortal- 
ity are for ever warned by the aspect of its loss. Milton draws 
the fallen angels as shuddering at the thought of the loss even of 
their life — lowered — shattered — with no aim or object but 
evil : — 

To be no more : sad cure ; for who would lose, 
Though full of pain, this intellectual being, 
These thoughts that wander through eternity ? 

How much more terrible must the thought be to those whose 
life is synonymous with joy ! 

A vast amount of misconception, and consequently of needless 
controversy, has arisen from the mistaken idea that eternal 
death is not properly eternal punishment. One class of reas- 
oners, holding eternal punishment, think it necessary to argue 
against eternal death as not being its equivalent ; while another 
class, holding more or less the doctrine of eternal death, feel 
bound to argue against the eternity of future punishment, from 
not perceiving that the eternal death which they hold is in truth 
its full equivalent. One class, again, imagines that in proving 
eternal punishment they have proved eternal life in torment, and 
the other that,, in overthrowing the notion of the latter, they 
have overthrown the former also. 3 

' We will here merely add that the term { Eternal Death,' taken 
by us as properly descriptive of the theory of the future de- 
struction and non-existence of the wicked, is the very term used 
by the best writers of the periods before and after the birth of 
Christ, when, they would describe the eternal loss of life and 

i> * Irenseus, v. 27. Witsius on the Covenants, i. v. xlii. 2 ' Eternity of Future Punish- 
ment,' G. Salmon, D. D., p. 1, &c. 'Eternal Punishment,' J. W. Barlow, M. A., p. 4, &c 
Religious Tendencies of the Times,' J. Grant, vol. i. 268, &c. 



10 - of the Old Testament. 

existence to beings who had once possessed it. Lucretius calls 
it ■ Immortal Death :' Cicero calls it ■ Everlasting Death : ' even 
Tertullian, though his theory compelled him to confound death 
with life, when he would describe a state from which there was 
no resurrection to life, can find no stronger truer description of it 
than 'Eternal Death.' 1 



CHAPTER KL 

TESTIMONY OF THE OLD TESTAMENT. 

Hattstg- in our last chapter removed all obstacles arising from an 
erroneous notion of the nature of the soul, we proceed to con- 
sider the direct proofs of our view. We will first advert to the 
testimony of the Old Testament. This is indeed by no means so 
clear, either as to the future of the redeemed orlost, as the Xew 
Testament, but there are undoubtedly many places not only 
in its later but in its earlier portions which speak of both. 2 

We will first advert to the original conception of Death. 
It was very early spoken of by God Himself. ' In the day that 
thou eat est ' of the tree of knowledge, He said to Adam, ' thou 

It surely die.' 3 We must remember that death was the 
law of the lower creation, as both Scripture and Geology testify, 
and therefore its idea and nature were already known to Adam 
as consisting in the loss of life. Accordingly, God does not, 
when he named to Adam the penalty of sin, explain its nature, 
which otherwise He must have done. But after Adam had 
rd, God in other words defines the penalty, and shows 

- death in man's case was the same thing as in the case of the 
brutes — ' lost thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return.' 4 God's 
definition of the the death inflicted for the first transgression 
is frequently repeated in different language in the later Scrip- 

js. Thus Paul tells us it is the death which all men undergo. 
whether they are among the saved or the lost. 5 Such, too, was 
that death which Christ endured for human sin — the death 
which the thieves beside Him suffered — ' even the death of 

1 ' Mors immortalis," Lucretius, iii. - Mors sempiternum malum.' Cicero, Tusc, Disp. i, 
-. 1 .Etemus a ■ Tertullian, De Res. ix. 331. ed. Lnt. Paris. 1067. 

n. iL f| * Gen. iii. 19 

5 Rom. v. IS, 14, IT; 1 Cor. x* -1 



Death! What It Is. 11 

the cross.' 1 We have thus the original meaning of death clearly 
and explicitly displayed in Scripture. It did not mean life spent 
in pain, but the loss of the life which God first gave to man 
in Eden. Such was man's primitive idea of death. Such was 
the universal idea formed of it wherever man lived and died. 
It is accordingly the primary, often the only, meaning of the 
word ' death ' in every language of the earth. 
\ Language, we know, assumes a variety of meaning. Words 
sometimes undergo so many subtle changes of sense that their 
latter meaning becomes the direct opposite to their first. The 
word Death, however, has remained true to its original in its 
various applications. Thus we have in Scripture the expressions 
'dead to sin,' 'dead to the law:' in our Catechism we have the 
phrase 'a death unto sin:' in ordinary life we speak of per- 
sons as being dead to certain passions or affections. All such 
expressions are derived from physical death, and are true to 
its original sense. They imply the departure and non-existence 
of relations and feelings which once were living and strong — 
their death. To the sense imposed on death in all times and 
by all nations there is one exception, that given to it in the the- 
ology of a portion of Christendom. Compelled by a terrific 
creed of pnnishment, Death is made to mean its direct opposite — 
' Life ' — some ' Condition of being ' or existence. 2 

But this late meaning attached by many Christians to the 
term ' death ' in one of its applications, namely, to future 
punishment, has not the smallest force as regards its use in 
the Old Testament. There the word must be taken in the 
sense stamped upon it and unaltered. There it is over and over 
again described as the end in the future world of obstinate 
transgressors. For such God declares He has ' provided the 
instruments of death:' of such as hate divine wisdom that 
wisdom says ' they that hate me love death : ' to the wicked 
God saith 'thou shalt surely die:' 'the soul that sinneth it 
shall die/ 3 

No one, we suppose, will apply such expressions to that death 
which all alike undergo as the children of Adam. They can 
only apply to future punishment. Death, then, is according 
to the Old Testament, to be after judgment the result of sin, 
as life is the result of righteousness. Can we suppose a God 
of truth, of justice, and of mercy, to mean by this well-un- 

i Phil. ii. 8 ; Acts ii. 24 ; Rom. v. 7, 8. 2 Rainbow for 1869, p. 254 ; Religious Tenden- 
cies, J. Grant, ii. 141. s Ps. vii. 13; Prov. viii. 36; xi. 4; Ezek. iii. 18 ; xviii. 4; xxxiii, 8. 



12 Testimony of the Old Testament. 

derstood phrase something unknown to his hearers, of a char- 
acter the very opposite to what they had from his own teaching 
conceived, and conveying a doom unutterably greater? The 
very idea is an insult to God. God speaks to men in the lan- 
guage of men. But hence it follows as a matter of course 
that loss of life is the doom pronounced against sinners in the 
Old Testament. 

But it is not only "by this phrase, ' death,' that the Old Testa- 
ment describes the punishment of the ungodly. By every 
expression in the Hebrew language significant of loss of life, loss 
of existence, the resolution of organized substance into its origi- 
nal parts, its reduction to that condition in which it is as though 
it had never been called into being, — by every such expression 
does the Old Testament describe the end of the ungodly. ' The 
destruction of the transgressors and of the sinners shall be 
together:' 'prepare them for the day of slaughter .*' ' the slain of 
the Lord shall be many : ' 'they shall go forth and look upon the 
carcasses of the men that have sinned:' 'God shall destroy 
them : ' ' they shall be consumed :' 'they shall be cut off: ' ' they 
shall be rooted out of the land of the living :' ' blotted out of the 
hook of life: 1 ' they are not. 11 The Hebrew scholar will see 
from the above passages that there is no phrase of the Hebrew 
language significant of all destruction short of that philosophical 
annihilation of elements which we do not assert which is not 
used to denote the end of the ungoxlly. 

For the benefit of the English reader we will present instances 
of the meaning of some of these phrases in things which relate to 
this present life. There are several Hebrew words applied 
to future punishment translated by the word ' perish.' Abad is 
one of the most common of these. When Heshbon was utterly 
cut off by the sword of Israel : when a sentence of extermination 
was pronounced against the house of Ahab: when the memory of 
the wicked has departed from the earth: when Esther appre- 
hends her death at the hands of Ahasuerus: it is this word 
which is used: they have, or will, or may perish. 2 Haras is 
another term in frequent use for future punishment. What is its 
meaning in common life ? When the altar of Baal w^as thrown 
down, stone after stone: when the strongholds of Zion were 
levelled to the ground: when a wall is broken down so that 

o 

its foundations are discovered : this is the term used. 3 Again : 

ils. i. 28; lxvi. 16, 24; Jer. xii. 3; Ps. xxviii. 5; xxxvii. 20; lxxiii. 27; xxxvii. 38; 
lii. 5; lxix. 28; Job xxvii. 19. 2 Numb. xxi. 30; 2 Iliugs ix. 3: Job xviii. IT; Estb. iv. 16. 
3 Judges vi. 25 ; Lam. ii. 2 ; Ezek. xiii. 14. 



Destruction. 13 

God will 'destroy* the ungodly. One Hebrew word for this 
is Tsamath. It is used in the sense of utterly cutting off and de- 
stroying from a place. 1 Another Hebrew word is Shamad. It 
is significant of utter extinction. When the women of the tribe 
of Benjamin had been slain ; when the nations of Canaan dis- 
appeared before the sword of Israel : when JVIoab ceased to be a 
nation : this is the word used for their destruction. 2 Again : 
the wicked will be ' cut off* The Hebrew is Karath in Xifal. 
What is its use in common life? When truth has become 
extinct from a sin-loving people : when weapons of war are 
broken in pieces: when life at the period of the flood perished 
from off the earth : when the life of an offender against the 
law of Moses was taken : this is the word used : i they are cut 
off.^ By another word, Nathats, God threatens future de- 
struction. In matters of this life it indicates destruction of 
an utter kind. When the infected house of the leper was cast 
down and dismantled : when the images of Baal were broken in 
pieces : when the stones of the altar of the sun were ground into 
powder : this is the word used for the process of destruction. 4 

To one or two individual texts we will afterwards more partic- 
ularly refer, as well as to its illustrations of future punishment ; 
but we need here go no further in order to ascertain the clear, 
distinct, oft-repeated testimony of the Old Testament. By 
every unambiguous term it has pointed out the punishment 
of the wicked as consisting, not in life, but in the loss of life, — 
not in their continuance in that organized form which constitutes 
man, but in its dissolution, its resolution into its original parts, 
its becoming as though it had never been called into existence. 
While the redeemed are to know a life which has no end, the 
lost are to be reduced to a death which knows of no awaking for 
ever and ever. Such is the testimony of the Old Testament. 



1 Ps. lxix. 4; ci. 5-8. 2 Judges xxi. 16; Deut. xii. 30; Jei\ xMii.42. 

* Jer. vii. 28 ; Zecn. far. 10 ; Gen. ix. 11 ; Ex. xxx. 33. 

* Lev. xiv. 45 ; 2 Kings xi. 18; xxxiii. 12. 



14 Testimony of the New Testament. 



CHAPTER IV. 

TESTIMONY OF THE NEW TESTAMENT. 

We now turn to the New Testament. We shall find it in 
perfect agreement with the Old. Before, however, bringing 
forward its statements, we will make a few observations on 
a new feature here introduced, viz: the change of language 
adopted in the publication of the Gospel Revelation. 

We remark, then, that the writers of the New Testament not 
•only must be supposed to follow the sense already fixed on 
the terms expressive of future punishment in the Hebrew Scrip- 
tures, but that they also give us another guarantee as to their 
meaning by their usage of the Greek tongue. The Gospel, 
revealed and recorded chiefly by Jews, is recorded, not in a 
provincial dialect, but in the language of the Roman World. 
We have here a guarantee as to their meaning, whose overpow- 
ering force on the present question we will show a little further 
-on. Paul, and Luke, and John, and Peter use a language which 
they had no hand in forming or moulding, but which was already 
provided for them to be the vehicle of their thoughts. They 
made no claim to alter the world's tongue, but to alter the faith 
of the world through the medium of that tongue which the 
world used and understood when they were children, learning 
the meaning of its words from their elders. 1 The ordinary 
Greek Lexicon, not lexicons of the New Testament, colored and 
tainted by theological opinion, is the true guide to the Greek of 
the New Testament. It is only where an idea new to the human 
mind is brought before it that we have a right to look for a new 
or modified phrase, whose sense is to be stamped upon it by 
the teachers of the novel truth. Neither a future life, nor 
judgment and punishment to come, were ideas novel to man. 
Heathen poetry and prose perpetually discussed them before the 
preaching of the Gospel. 

We will first draw attention to the fact that the punishment of 
the wicked is just as frequently described as their death in 
the New Testament as in the Old, without the smallest effort 
to show that its terms e death,' or ' to die,' have any new sense 

1 Discussions on the Gospels. By Rev. A. Roberts, M. A., pp. 3543. 



Death. 15 

placed upon them. 1 These words, as all other words on this 
question, are used without any explanation, as words whose 
sense was long established. Thus our Lord, speaking of Himself, 
says, 'This is the bread which came down from heaven, that 
a man may eat thereof, and not die : ' and again He says, ' Who- 
soever liveth and believeth in me shall never die.'' 11 In these 
passages He implies that they who do not believe in Him 
shall die. What our Lord implies of the ungodly, Paul affirms of 
them: 'If ye live after the flesh ye shall die.' 3 Yery frequently 
repeated are the passages in which the expression ' death ' is used 
for future punishment. Thus our Lord says, l If a man keep my 
sayings he shall never see death.' Paul affirms of wicked works 
that their 'end is death,' that*' the wages of sin is death:' of 
those who perish he says that to such ' we are the savour of 
death unto death.' James declares that ' sin when finished 
bringeth forth death : ' and that ' he which converteth a sinner 
shall save a soul from death.' John declares that the ungodly 
shall suffer 'the second death.' 4 We have thus, in repeated 
places, death described as the lot of the wicked in the life to 
come, nor is there in any one of them the least attempt made 
to show that death had any other than its usual sense, viz : 
loss of life. 

As #we proceed in our examination of the ISTew Testament 
we will find ourselves confirmed in our view. To ' the second 
death' we have given the usual meaning of 'loss of life here- 
after,' as death now means the loss of life here. We will 
proceed to show that such is the meaning which the New Testa- 
ment itself imposes on the term. Its uniform testimony is that 
' eternal life ' hereafter will be the exclusive possession of the 
just, and that the wicked will certainly not obtain it: 5 .'He that 
believeth on the Son hath everlasting life : and he that believeth 
not the Son shall not see life.' Our simple enquiry is, what 
is meant by that Greek word 6 translated 'life' in the passages 
referred to. Our Lord in addressing Himself to the Jewish 
people, Luke in writing a Gospel for the Gentile world, Paul 
in writing to Rome, the metropolis of heathenism, or Corinth 
priding itself on its Grecian tongue, James, Peter, and Jude 
writing to Christians wherever scattered over the earth, all 
alike use this word as universally understood. We have only, 

1 Thanatos, Apothnesko. 2 «7ohnvi. 50; xi. 26 3 Rom. viii. 13. 4 John viii. 51 ; 
Rom. vi. 21-23; 2 Cor. li. 10; James i. 15, v. 20; Rev. xx. 14. 5 Matt. xix. 29; John iii. 
36; Rom. ii. 7, v. 21 ; James i. 12 ,• 1 Pet. ill. 7. e Zoe. 



16 Testimony of the Isew Testament. 

therefore, to refer to our classical dictionaries, and there we find 
its primary and universally accepted sense to be existence. If we 
want any further confirmation, let us listen to the Apostle James 
defining its meaning : ' What is your life ? ' It is even a vapor \ 
that appeareth for a little time, and then vanisheth away.' 1 On 
the classical usage, and the express definition of the New Testa- 
ment, we take our stand. Dictionaries of the Xew Testament, 
and commentators on it, may, if they please, put upon the 
phrase the sense of ' happiness ' in the numberless passages where 
it occurs, but we deny to them the right to alter the meaning of 
a well understood Grecian word for the sake of bolstering up 
their baseless and horrid creed. 

There is another Greek word 2 constantly translated ' life,' in 
the New Testament. 3 With respect to this word one thing is 
certain ; that it does not bear in classical dictionaries, nor even 
in dictionaries of the New Testament so far as we know, th^t 
sense of ' happiness j which these latter have sought to impose 
upon the term before referred to. Another thing is equally cer- 
tain, that in passages where this word can only mean ' life,' i. e. 
' animal life,' such as we share with the lower creation, this life it 
is expressly declared shall be lost hereafter by the ungodly. Let 
us consider one such passage. In Matt. x. 39 our Lord declares, 
'.ZZe that findeth his life shall lose it, and he that loseth his iifefor 
my sake shall find it? "What is this life which the fearful and 
the unbelieving prolonged by their denial of Christ, and which 
martyrs lost by their confession of Christ? It is, and can be, 
nothing but animal existence. It is the life which the good and 
the bad have in common. It is that which both alike value, and 
would prolong, but which one are content to lose and do lose for 
Christ, and which the other will not lose for his sake. That 
which these latter have here prolonged for a little while, the 
Lord of Life tells them they shall lose in the future retribution, 
i. e. they shall cease to exist. Christ's words can here have no sec- 
ond meaning. And this is agreeable to all Scripture. Immor- 
tality is nowhere spoken of as the possession of fallen man, but is 
described as a blessing to be sought by him as much as the ' glory 
and honor ' of the future stat<\ 4 

And here we will r: for lor a moment to a passage in the history 
of Moses wV _. strongly confirms our view. Moses intercedes 
with n ^a that Israel may be forgiven, and asks that, if his prayer 

i James iv, 14. 2 Psyche. 3 Matt. ii. 20, x. 30 : John x. 11 ; Rom. xi. 3. 
* Rom. ii. 7, vi. 23. 



Destruction. 17 

~be not granted, he may be blotted out of the book which God 
had written. 1 This book can be no other than that ' Book of 
Life ' frequently referred to in Scripture, in which the names of 
the redeemed are written. 2 What, then, did Moses mean by his 
receiving the doom of sinners, and being blotted out of the book 
-of life ? We cannot for a moment suppose that he wished through- 
out eternity for a life of pain and moral corruption. He could 
only have wished for the utter cessation of a life which he then 
felt would be intolerable if his prayer were refused. Since this 
must be his meaning, it follows that what he asked for himself 
shall actually be the condition of the ungodly, for God in this 
place declared that what Moses sought for himself He will inflict 
on them — ' Whosoever hath sinned against me, him will I blot 
out of my book.' 

We now proceed to consider other expressions significant of 
future punishment. Of these none are so common as the Greek 
verb and noun translated by the words ' destroy,' * perish,' ' de- 
struction.' 3 None are more significant of the utter loss of life. 
* Broad is the way that leadeth to destruction,' saith Christ : and 
Paul speaks of the ungodly as ' vessels of wrath, fitted to de- 
struction.' Our Lord tells us to fear Him ' who is able to de- 
stroy both body and soul in hell : ' and Paul affirms that ' they 
who have sinned without law shall perish without law,' that he 
is ' a' savour of Christ in them that are saved and in them that 
perish.' 4 

If we go to the Greek Lexicon we will find that the terms used 
in these passages signify primarily Che destruction and loss of 
life. 5 For the present we confine our attention to their use in 
the New Testament. We will find it in strict agreement with 
the analogy of ordinary Greek writers. Matt. vii. 13 runs thus : 
4 Broad is the way that leadeth to destruction? and the next verse 
adds ' narrow is the way that leadeth unto life.'' Here it will be 
remarked that ' destruction ' is used as the opposite to c life,' i. e. 
as the loss of life. Matt. x. 28 runs thus : ' Fear not them which 
kill the body, but are not able to kill the soul : but rather fear 
Him who is able to destroy both body and soul in hell.' Here ' de- 
stroy ' is used as the equivalent to ' kill : ' that which man is able 
to do to our bodies, but which he cannot do to our souls, viz: kill 
them y that God is able to do in hell both to body and soul. The 

1 Ex. xxxii. 32, 33. * Ps. lxix. 28: Luke x. 20 ; Rev. xx. 15. 3 Apollumi, Apoleia. 

* Matt. vii. 13 ; Rom. ix. 22; Matt. x. 28 ; Rom. ii. 12 ; 2 Cor. ii. 15. 

* Fairbalrna Imperial Bible Dictionary. Art. ' Perdition.' 1 



18 Testimony of the ISfew Testament. 

same connection of ' destruction ' with loss of life is seen in 2 Cor, 
ii. 15, 16 : ' We are a sweet savour of Christ in them that are 
saved and in them that pc?'ish. To the one we are the savour of 
death unto death.'' And so we find from the speech of Festus to 
Agrippa, recorded by Luke in Acts xxv. 16, that the word usu- 
ally translated * destruction ' was the common term used for the 
loss of physical existence. These passages abundantly show us 
that the New Testament, when it speaks of the c destruction y 
of the wicked, follows the general analogy of the Greek language, 
and means loss of life in hell. 

In exact agreement with the foregoing are the other expressions 
used in the New Testament. Thus Paul adopts the teaching of 
the Old Testament as truly descriptive of future punishment, and 
sums it up in these words, ' Behold, ye despisers, and won- 
der, and perish.' 1 The Greek word 2 here translated ' perish,' 
means properly to ' become unseen, to disappear and be heard no 
more,' The whole process is described in these pithy words ; 
unbelievers will first see what they have rejected, will marvel at 
their folly, and then vanish out of existence. 

Another Greek word, 3 translated ' defile,' l corrupt,' ' destroy/ 
and used to express future punishment, has, when applied to 
man, two main senses. One is to deprave and corrupt, the other 
to destroy by depriving of existence. As it would be impious to 
suppose that God will ever do Satan's work of corrupting, we can 
only take the word in the second sense. 4 A good example- 
of these different senses is found in 1 Cor. iii. 17, 'If any man de- 
file the temple of God, him shall God destroy? It is the same 
Greek verb which here first signifies ' defile ' and afterwards £ de- 
stroy.' The first is the sinner's guilty act : the second is God's 
punishment hereafter by death. The Greek noun 5 of this verb 
has in the same way the two senses of moral corruption and 
destruction by death, and is frequently applied to future punish- 
ment. 6 When spoken of as what God will inflict in punishment 
it can only bear the latter sense. We would direct attention to 
the passage in 2 Pet. ii. 12, as affording indubitable proof that it 
is thus used in Scripture. Speaking of the ungodly, Peter says, 
1 these, as natural brute beasts made to be taken and destroyed, 
shall utterly perish in their own corruption? Here the same 
Greek word is used of the end of beasts and of the end of the vn- 
godly. We know what is the end of beasts taken and de- 

i Acts xiii. 41. 2 Apbanizo. » Phtheiro. « 1 Cor. iii. 17 ; 2 Pet. ii. 12. 
sPMhora. 6 Gal. vi. 8; 2 Pet. ii! 12. 



The Grecian Language. 19 

stroyed : even such Peter declares will "be the end of the ungod- 
ly in the future life : they shall perish there as beasts perish here. 

Another Greek word 1 translated ' destroy,' and applied to 
future punishment, is properly significant of utter extermi- 
nation by death. 2 Its noun, 3 also thus applied, has the same 
signification: the wicked shall be 'punished with everlasting 
destruction from the presence of the Lord.' 4 

We have brought forward a variety of phrases from the New 
Testament. We have now to consider the mighty bearing 
on their meaning of the fact that this ISTew Testament is written 
in the Greek tongue. In that tongue all these phrases are to be 
found. Before the Gospel was preached, their meaning was 
fully established in the cultivated and the common mind of 
the human race. What is more, they were all in common 
use, and applied to, and their sense established, with reference to 
this very point now under discussion. The immortality of 
the soul was not a question for Jewish and Christian thought 
alone ; it was the question of questions for the universal human 
mind. In particular, it was the question of questions in the 
various schools of Grecian Philosophy. One of the noblest 
specimens of human reasoning, building its lofty superstructure 
on uncertain data, that has ever charmed, exalted, and, for 
our part, we must add, bewildered the human intellect, is found 
in the dying discourse of Socrates to his friends, handed down to 
a deathless fame in the 'Phaedo' of Plato. Its object was 
to prove the immortality of the soul — that it could never cease to 
be — that through whatever changes it might pass, whatever 
pollutions it might suffer, whatever fearful torments it might 
endure, there was the deathless principle of the human soul 
which asserted an eternal life and utterly refused to die. It 
could never be, according to Plato, a thing of yesterday, 
an existence of the past but not of the present, a figure once 
jotted down in the book of life and then blotted out of it for ever. 
In what terms is the denial of its mortality conveyed ? In the 
^ery terms in which the punishment of the wicked is asserted in 
ihe New Testament. Where the latter says the soul shall die, 
Plato says it shall not die ; where the latter says it shall be de- 
stroyed, Plato says it shall not be destroyed ; where the latter 
says it shall perish and suffer corruption, Plato says it shall not 
perish and is incorruptible. 5 The phrases are the very same, 

i Exolothreuo. 2 Acta iii. 23. 3 Olethroe. * 1 These, v. 3; 2 These, i. 9 ; 1 Tim. 
ri. 9. 5 Plato 1 * ' Phaedo,' paragraphs 38, 14, 29, 23, 8, 55, 37, 41, 44, 17, ed. Bekker. 



20 Testimony of the New Testament. 

only that what Plato denies of all souls alike, the Xew Testa- 
ment asserts of some of the souls of men. But the discussion 
of the question was not confined to the school of Plato or to his 
times. Every school of philosophy took it up, whether to con- 
firm Plato's view, or to deny it, or to heap ridicule upon it. All 
the phrases we have been discussing from the Xew Testament 
had been explained, turned over and over, handled with all the 
power of the masters of language, presented in every phase, 
so that of their sense there could be no doubt, nor could there be 
any one ignorant of their sense before Jesus spoke, or an Evan- 
gelist or Apostle wrote. The subject had not died out before 
the days of Christ. It never could and never will die out. In 
every city of the Roman world were schools of Grecian thought 
in the days of the Apostles. In every school the question before us 
was discussed in the phrases and language of the Xew Testament. 
In Jerusalem, and Rome, and Athens, and Corinth, and Ephesus, 
and Antioch — wherever a Christian preacher opened his mouth to 
speak to man of his future destiny — where Platonists, or Epi- 
cureans, or Stoics, or Alexandrians, to whom the question of the 
soul's immortality was a question of constant thought, with 
whom the phrases in which the preacher addressed them as 
to their solemn future were familiar household words. Their 
language was his language, whether he spoke or wrote ; their 
terms were his terms, and their meaning his meaning, else 
there were perplexities without a clue, logomachies without 
an end. And what did the Christian preacher declare, and the 
Christian writer write, to that world-wide community which was 
ruled and bound together, not merely by the power of Roman 
will, but by the sceptre of the Grecian tongue ? J In Sermon and 
Disputation, in Gospel and History and Epistle and Revelation, 
the propagators of the new religion asserted of the persons of the 
wicked — i. e. of souls and bodies reunited at the resurrection — 
that which Plato had denied could happen to any soul. The 
cultivated intellect of the world, as well as the popular mind, 
read in the words of Christ, of Paul, of John, of Peter, of James, 
that what one of its sects of philosophy taught could happen to 
no soul, and what another taught should happen to all souls, the 
rising school of the Xazarene taught would happen to those 
whom its phraseology described as ' unjust,' ' wicked,' ' unbe- 
lievers.' Plato's noble conception, itself but the utterance of the 
longing of the human heart for its original inheritance, was 

1 Hoberfs •Discussions on the Gospels.' pp. 26-29, 33. 43. 



The Grecian Schools, 21 

taken up by the New Testament, only that it had here given to 
it its true direction, and had the eternal life after which it 
yearned connected with the God of Life manifested in His Son. 
In Jesus Christ was that ' life ' which Plato fancied might exist 
in the soul itself. This life he would bestow upon his people, 
realizing more than the conception of Plato. But away from 
Him there was no life. On those who would not come to Him 
for life there would come finally — after stripes few or many — the 
end pictured for all by Epicurus. The Gospel brought together 
the fragments of truth scattered throughout human systems. 
Those who would soar it raises to God ; tnose who would revel 
in the sty of sensuality it sinks to the level of the beasts that 
perish. 

We will now draw attention to one other phrase * of the New 
Testament significant of future punishment. It occurs in Paul's 
wish that he ' were accursed from Christ for his brethren ; ' 2 a 
passage affording an exact parallel to the prayer of JMoses already 
referred to. There can be no doubt that, whatever Paul here 
means by being * accursed from Christ,' is that condition in which 
the ungodly will really be. 3 What, then, could Paul here wish 
for himself ? Less of him than of almost any man that ever lived 
are we to suppose that he could for a moment wish for himself an 
eternal life of blasphemy and moral corruption which, according 
to one of the theories we are opposing, is the condition of the 
reprobate throughout eternity. We can only suppose him to 
mean that he could suffer an eternal death, a blotting out of his 
own name from the book of the living, if by so doing he could 
gain for his kinsmen the life he had surrendered for himself. 4 
This sense is in exact agreement with the use of the term ' ac- 
cursed' among the Greeks, by whom it was applied to any 
animal devoted to death, and removed out of the sight of men, 
in order to avert calamity. We will alsp find abundant confir- 
mation of our view in the usage of the corresponding Hebrew 
term (Cherem.) in the Old Testament, when applied to things 
devoted to cursing. 5 Utter death where there was life, utter 
destruction where no life existed, was the end of persons and 
things thus devoted to a curse. 



Note. — I had intended to add to this reprint of Mr. Con- 
stable's work, an appendix, containing with comments, all the 

i Anathema. 2 Horn. ix. 3. See Afford. 3 1 Cor. xvi. 22. 
% 4J3engel on Rom. ix. 3. 5 Deut. vii. 2t5, xiii. l(i; Josh. vi. 17-21, vii. 13-25. 



22 Note on Testimony of the New Testament. 

passages in the New Testament bearing upon future punishment, 
but this, I find, would make the pamphlet too bulky. I desire, 
however, to supplement this chapter upon the Testimony of 
the New Testament, with at least a hasty survey of some of 
these passages. 

Has it never occurred to the reader, as to myself, when 
searching for Biblical language in which to present and en- 
force the eternity of future suffering, to be surprised and puz- 
zled to observe how unsatisfactory and feeble seem all the 
Apostolic references to future unending woe? In fact, through- 
out John's Gospel and the Epistles, where the doctrines of 
the New Testament are especially unfolded, future punishment is 
mentioned only under some term of death or destruction! How 
simple is Christ's language all through John, beginning with the 
Gospel in Epitome, as Luther called it, "For God so loved 
the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whosoever 
believeth in Him should not perish^ but have everlasting life." 1 
And so throughout this Gospel He ever sets simply life against 
death. Surely, this is no figure of speech. To " perish " is the 
literal opposite of "everlasting life." We do not believe that 
our Lord anticipated the need of a commentator, as we have 
ever had for us, to explain that " perishing " and " death " mean 
everlasting life in misery, while " everlasting life " should read 
everlasting happiness, or something of that kind. Ah ! may 
we not well enquire whether the Church of to-day is not, like 
the Pharisees of old, " teaching for doctrines the command- 
ments of men ? " 2 

In the Acts of the Apostles, that missionary record of the first 
planting of the Gospel, among all its reports and outlines of 
sermons, should we not expect to find some explicit notice 
of eternal sufferings if such there be ? Here is every passage it 
presents on that question : (1.) Chap. iii. 23, " Every soul 
which will not hear that Prophet, shall be destroyed from among 
the people." (2.) xii. 41, " Behold, ye despisers, and wonder 
and perish" (literally, vanish away.) (3.) ver. 46, " Unworthy 
of everlasting life." (4.) xviii. 6, " When they opposed them- 
selves and blasphemed, he shook his raiment and said, Your 
blood be upon your own heads : I am clean : from henceforth 
I will go unto the Gentiles." Thus to these blaspheming Jews, 
instead of setting forth as their punishment a hell of eternal tor- 
ment, Paul solemnly tells them they must answer for their 

i John iii. 16. * Matt. xy. 9. 



Note on Testimony of the New Testament. 23 

conduct with their lives — " your blood." (5.) xxiv. 15, " There 
shall be a resurrection of the dead, both of the just and of 
the unjust." And this is absolutely all to be found on this sub- 
ject in Acts. 

Nor will anything more in any Epistle be found, expressing a 
thought of the eternity of torment. What ! you may exclaim, 
has not James, plain spoken and practical as he is, has he 
not left us in his Epistle one unmistakable declaration of future 
unending woe ? Let us see. Chap. i. ver. 2, he tells us that as the 
grass withereth when the burning sun rises upon it, " So shall the 
rich man fade away in his ways ;" evidently referring not alone 
to that closing of mortal life which all must undergo, for in the 
next verse, " Blessed is the man that endureth temptation, 
for when he is tried he shall receive the crown of life" -■■. Verse 
15, " Sin, when it is finished, bringeth forth death" ', Chap. v. 3,' 
The rust of your gold and silver shall eat your flesh as it were 
fire ; and verse 20, " He that converteth the sinner shall save a 
soul from death" Here we have the entire testimony of James.' 
It is plain and to the point, — Sin, when it is finished, bringeth 
forth death! 

Perfectly accordant with this is the testimony of Peter. H. It is 
simple, intelligible, explicit, if taken literally ; if Ave take it 
as usually explained, as referring to an unending life of misery, 
we must confess it is strangely lacking in expression and illustra- 
tion. For example, we have in Chap. i. ver. 23, the Apostle 
speaking to and so of individuals, not simply^ of their bodies — 
" Being born again not of corruptible seed, but of incorruptible, 
by the Word of God, which liveth and abideth forever. For all 
flesh is as grass, * * . the grass withereth, * * but " the 
Word of the Lord endureth forever." ,' Like ^ the grass the in- 
dividual begotten of corruptible seed naturally perishes, (with- 
ereth, says Peter — fades away, says James,) but when the same 
is regenerated, born again of incorruptible seed, by the Word of 
God, he then liveth and endureth forever ! \ It is the same, 
simple, old story — death or life, and each state eternal. 1 

We have not room for Paul's many utterances on this subject. 
Take as samples, two or three passages in which, if anywhere, we 
should look for an unequivocal expression of the whole truth. 
First, Philippians iil 18, 19, "Many walk of whom I have told 
you often, and tell you now even weeping, that they are the 
enemies of the Cross of Christ, whose end is destricctio?i" Af- 



24 Note on Testimony of the N~eic Testament. 

fected even to weeping by the thought of their intending doom, 
had that fate been an endless existence in torment, would Paul 
have contented himself with this word, which suggests rather a 
total arrest of all existence ? 

Again, Galatians v. 19-21, after a catalogue of the vilest 
crimes the Apostle sums up, " Of the which I tell you before as 
I have also told you in time past, that they who do such things 
shall not inherit the kingdom of God." Here Paul speaks 
of the loss such evil doers sustain, but not one word of the im- 
measurable suffering to be inflicted through all eternity ! Thus 
silent in every Epistle on this point, how, if such a fate were 
before the men of his time, could he say as in Colossians i. 
28, " Warning every man, and teaching every man in all wis- 
dom?" What is the only fair inference from all this? Un- 
questionably, that Paul had not a thought of immortality for 
the wicked ! 

But once more, notice a passage which appears to me to be in- 
controvertible. In 1 *Cor. xv. 54, 55, we read, "Death is 
swallowed up in victory. O death, where is thy sting ? O 
grave, where is thy victory ? " The whole context proves that 
Paul here speaks of that mortal death which has passed upon 
all men. In verse 57 he continues, "Thanks be unto God, who 
giveth us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ." The 
victory over death, what is it ? In the first of these verses 
the Apostle has defined it for us in so many words, as " this cor- 
ruptible putting on incorruption, and this mortal putting on im- 
mortality." So that according to the Apostle, the attainment of 
a literal immortality, of life beyond the grave, is the victory 
over death ; and this victory, he declares, Comes to us through 
our Lord Jesus Christ. All men then do not possess it, for it is 
given to " us " only through Christ. Is it not then a logical in- 
ference, nay, the plain teaching of this passage, that for those 
out of Christ, there is no such victory, that for them the cor- 
ruptible does not put on incorruption, the mortal does not 
put on immortality. Deny this who can ? It is " our Savior 
Jesus Christ, who has brought life and immortality to light." 1 
Apart from Him there is no immortality ! 

In this connection let me refer the reader to the last of 
tho Old Testament Prophets, Malachi iii. 18, and iv. 1. Then 
shall ye return, and discern between the righteous and the 
wicked, between him that serveth God and him that serveth 

» 2 Timothy, i 10. 



Note on Testimony of the New Testament. 25 

Him not. For behold, the day that cometh, shall burn as 
an oven, and all the proud} yea, and all that do wickedly 
shall be stubble, and the day that cometh shall bum them 
up, saith the Lord of Hosts, that it shall leave them neither root 
nor branch" What is left of the stubble if both root and 
branch are burned up ? Shall we say that this solemn declara- 
tion from the Lord of Hosts is a mere figurative use of language? 
Or rather, could words be chosen more fitly and fully to announce 
the literal destruction of the finally impenitent ? I picture 
to myself that intensely heated oven; I see the dry stubble, 
plucked up by the roots from the ground it cumbers, thrust into 
its open mouth ; its hot breath seizes upon it ; a moment of 
fierce crackling when the flame leaps even higher than before, 
and — all is over ; the destruction is complete, naught but ashes 
remains. And then I turn again to Malachi, and the next verse 
but one I read, "The wicked shall be ashes under the soles 
of your feet in the day that I shall do this, saith the Lord 
of Hosts." 

And the next succeeding Prophet, whose coming was in 
this very chapter foretold by Malachi, John the Baptist opens 
the New Testament teachings on this topic with the same 
language and figure. He proclaims of the Messiah, "whose fan 
is in His hand, and He will thoroughly purge His floor, and 
gather the wheat into His garner ; but He will burn up the chaff 
with unquenchable fire." 1 

And again He, who speaks as never man spake, repeats 
the same solemn announcement. "AS therefore the tares are 
gathered and burned in the fire, SO shall it be in the end of 
the world." 2 After all this, these repeated declarations from 
the Lord of Hosts, from inspired prophet, and from the Son 
of God, can it be that we venture, mentally if not audibly, 
to reply, Not so, Lord : the tares, the chaff, the stubble, 
are burned up and literally destroyed, but we cannot believe 
that the wicked are "so" destroyed. Shall we presume thus to 
" make void the word of God through our traditions ? " 3 

C. L. L 



i Matt. iii. 12. * Matt. xiii. 40. 3 Mark viii. 13. 



26 The Illustrations of Scripture, 



CHAPTER V. 
# 

THE ILLUSTRATIONS OF SCRIPTURE. 

We will devote a short chapter to the illustrations of future 
punishment found in Scripture. They are very numerous, pre- 
sent the subject in every variety of aspect, and are every one of 
them harmonious with the rest. We will compare them with 
the illustrations selected by men who held Augustine's theory of 
Hell, and with those of men who held that temporal death was 
for all that eternal non-existence, to which we hold that the 
second death will consign the ungodly. We have no hesitation 
in saying that the illustrations of Scripture, so varied, so numer- 
ous, so harmonious, are by themselves sufficient to decide this 
great question. They overthrow alike the system of eternal 
misery and of universal restoration. 

Thus we find in the Old Testament the following illustrations 
of future punishment. The wicked shall be dashed in pieces like 
a potter's vessel ; they shall be like the beasts that perish ; like 
the untimely fruit of a woman ; like a whirlwind that passeth 
away ; like a waterless garden scorched by an eastern sun ; like 
garments consumed by the moth. They shall consume like the 
fat of lambs in the fire ; consume like smoke ; melt like wax ; 
burn like tow ; consume like thorns ; vanish away like exhausted 
waters. 1 The illustrations of the New Testament are of the 
same character. The end of the wicked is there compared to 
fish cast away to corruption ; to a house thrown down to its 
foundations ; to the destruction of the old world by water, and 
that of the Sodomites by fire; to the death and destruction of 
natural brute beasts. They sjiall be like wood cast into quench- 
less flame ; like chaff burnt up ; like tares consumed ; like a dry 
branch reduced to ashes. 2 

Such are the illustrations of Scripture. These are the images 
which God has selected from the world that is open to our inspec- 
tion, in order to let us know what shall happen to the ungodly 
hereafter. We have no hesitation in saying that they are one 
and all irreconcilable with both Augustine's and Origen's theories 
of Hell. If it was true, according to the former, that the wicked 

i Ps. ii. 9, xxxvii. 20, xlix. 20, lviii. 7, 8, lxviii. 2 ; Prov. x. 25 ; Is. i. 30 ; xxxiii. 12, li. 8. 
a Matt. xiii. 48 ; Luke vi. 49, xvii. 27-29 ; 2 Pet. ii. 12 ; Matt. iii. 10-12, xiii. 30 ; John xv. 6. 



The Illustrations of Lucretius. 2 7 

never cease to exist in hell, that they preserve throughout eter- 
nity the form, substance, and organization with which they enter 
it, these illustrations would be one and all unsuitable and false. 
The wicked would not be according to Augustine's theory, like 
the beasts that perish, or a whirlwind that passeth away, or gar- 
ments consumed by the moth. They would not consume like the 
fat of lambs in the fire, or consume into smoke, or melt like wax. 
They would not be like wood cast into quenchless flames, or like 
chaff" burnt up, or like tares consumed, or like a dry branch 
reduced to ashes. All these lose their form, substance, and 
organization, and become as though they had never been, which 
the wicked never do, according to the theory of Augustine. The 
illustrations of Scripture, therefore, are fatal to his view. Every 
one of its images point — not to the preservation of being in any 
state of pain, but to the utter blotting out of existence and being 
and identity. 

Let us now compare these illustrations so far as we can 
with those of ordinary writers, and see if the comparison does 
not bear out our view. The Epicurean poet Lucretius is a writer 
just suitable for our purpose. He knew nothing of our Scriptures, 
and wrote without any reference to their views. He held, how- 
ever, the theory most opposed in philosophy to that of Plato. 
He held that the death which we all here endure was to all men 
what we suppose the second death will finally be to the ungodly. 
He held that body and soul alike ceased to exist at death ; that 
there was then an utter end of man's being. He does not use 
many illustrations of this destruction of all life, but there is one 
which he does use very frequently as most descriptive of his 
view. It is that the dissolution of life at death is like smoke 
vanishing and dispersing into air. 

1 As the smoke disperses into the air, 
So believe that the soul also is dissolved.' l 

Now this illustration of Lucretius is also a favorite illustration of 
Scripture when describing the end of the ungodly ; c the wicked 
shall perish : they shall consume ; into smoke shall they consume 
away.'' 2 

We will now turn to another class of writers, here equally un- 
suspected and fit for our purpose — the Christian Fathers Tertul- 
lian and Augustine. They held that the wicked will exist 
for ever in the fire of hell. They wished to illustrate their view. 

i Lucretius De Her. Nat. iii. 2 Ps. xxxyu. 20, lxviii. 2. 



28 The Illustrations of Scripture. 

Is it not most significant that these men, perfectly familiar with 
the illustrations of Scripture on this subject, instinctively turn 
from them as unsuitable for their purpose, and select with much 
pains, from a survey of nature as it was understood by them, 
a series of illustrations not only absent from Scripture, but of 
a nature diametrically opposed to those of Scripture. According 
to Tertullian, the wicked will be like mountains, which burn but 
are not consumed ; like a body struck by lightning, whose 
organization is uninjured, and itself not reduced to ashes. Ac- 
cording to Augustine, the wicked will be like salamanders, 
which are not destroyed in the fire ; like diamonds, which are in- 
destructible in scorching heat ; like Vesuvius and Etna, which 
burn but do not consumed These are not the illustrations of 
Scripture ; they contradict those of Scripture. According to 
these latter, the wicked will not be like the salamanders and 
burning mountains of Tertullian and Augustine : they will be 
destroyed, consume away, be reduced to ashes, as the fat of 
lambs or the dry wood and thorns. 

In obedience, then, to the teaching of Scripture in its oft- 
repeated illustrations, we hold that the punishment of the wicked 
will result in the destruction of their being. Every one of its 
images point — not to the preservation of life in any condition, 
but to the loss of life, the utter blotting out of existence. 



CHAPTER VI 

EXAMINATION OF PARTICULAR TEXTS. 

In our rapid survey of Scripture heretofore we were unable 
to give to some individual texts that attention which from their 
prominent place in this controversy they deserve. We now pro- 
ceed to do so. The texts we refer to are texts which are most 
commonly and most boldly advanced by advocates of the Augus- 
tinian theory in proof of their view. We think a fair and candid 
examination of +v .^ will show that instead of supporting they 
conde^ ^eir view. 

,v e will first consider Mark ix. 44. Speaking here of hell, and 
of those who will be consigned to hell, our Lord most solemnly, 
and with threefold repetition pronounces their doom, — ' their 

1 Apoi. xlviii. De. Civ. Dei. 21. 



The Illustrations of Augustine. 29 

worm dieth not, and the fire is not quenched.' It is on this text 
that Augustine in his l City of God' mainly relies for his view, 1 
and this is perhaps the text of all others which is most boldy pat 
forward as establishing it. Instead of supporting, however, 
it contradicts it plainly. This solemn declaration of Christ 
is not an original saying of his, hut is quoted word for word 
from Isaiah lxvi. 24. TVe will give it with its context. Speaking 
of the redeemed of the earth, Isaiah says : ' They shall go forth, 
and look upon the carcasses of the men that have transgressed 
against me, for their worm shall not die, neither shall their fire be 
quenched, and they shall be an abhorring unto all flesh.' A 
moment's glance shows us that both the worm and the fire are 
alike external to and distinct from the subject on which they 
prey, and also that what both prey upon are not the living 
but the dead. Isaiah frequently uses the image of the c worm,' 
but it is always in connection with death. 2 The fearful image is 
taken from the worm which feeds upon the carcass, and the fire 
which consumes it, and conveys the notion, not of life, but of its 
opposite, death ; and of hell as the cleanser of God's world 
by the utter destruction of the remains of the wicked. These 
most solemn words of the prophet, so solemnly endorsed by 
Christ, assert a state of eternal death and destruction, not one 
of eternal life in hell, as the fate of transgressors in the world to 
come. They are fatal alike to the theories of Augustine and 
Orio-en. 

Isaiah xxxiii. 14: 'Who among us shall dwell with the 
devouring fire ? Who among us shall dwell with everlasting 
burnings ? ' is very often brought forward in proof of the eternity 
of future misery. While some have doubted that this refers 
to future punishment, we are not ourselves disposed to question 
that it does. If it does, it affords us very valuable proof 
that the eternity which is affirmed of future punishment does 
not refer to any eternity of life in misery, but to the eternal 
extinction of life, the irrevocable loss which the wicked will 
bring upon themselves. This is seen from the context of the 
passage. They who are spoken of in the 14th verse are 'the 
people' of the 12th verse who c shall be as the burnings of lime: 
as thorns cut up shall they be burned in the fire? The i everlast- 
ing burnings,' then, are burnings whose effects are endured 
throughout eternity. They have cut off a life which shall never 
be restored again. They are God's solemn warning that Origen's 

1 Book xxi. cap. 9. 2 i s> xi Vi n ? n. g t 



SO Examination of Particular Texts, 

theory of a restoration at some future period from hell is a false 
and delusive dream. 

We now come to the famous passages in the Book of Revela- 
tion. Driven hopelessly from the plainer parts of Scripture, the 
advocates of eternal life in hell think that they have in this 
obscure, mysterious, and highly-wrought figurative book, at 
least two passages which authorize them to change number- 
less passages in the rest of Scripture, and some even in the Book 
of Revelation itself, from their plain and obvious meaning to one 
that is forced, unnatural, and often false to all the laws of 
the interpretation of language. We will see whether they 
are possessed of this tremendous force. Of the worshippers 
of the beast we are told in the former that they ' shall be tor- 
mented with lire and brimstone in the presence of the holy 
angels, and in the presence of the Lamb : and the smoke of their 
torment ascendeth up for ever and ever : and they have no rest 
day nor night : ' in the latter passage we are told that ' the devil 
that deceived them was cast into the lake of fire and brimstone, 
where the beast and the false prophet are, and shad he tormented 
day and night forever and ever.'' 

y We will not dwell upon the fact that it is a disputed question 
whether these passages, or at least the former of them, refer 
at all to future punishment. Elliott, who maintained the theory 
of Augustine, has no hesitation in referring Rev. xiv. 10, 11, 
together with the kindred passage in xix. 3, to a temporal 
judgment, viz: the swallowing up by volcanic fire of the territo- 
ry of Rome in Italy. 1 We will, however, take them in their 
usual reference, as indicating God's eternal judgments hereafter 
upon fallen spirits and wicked men. Their sense we believe 
to be this — that the future punishment of all consigned to hell 
will be of an eternal nature, and that its fearful effect — the plung- 
ing of its subjects intc> death and destruction — will ever remain 
visible to the redeemed and angelic worlds. 

I*. We will not try to established this sense by examining the 
force of each word. We deny that language so highly figurative 
and poetical is capable of any such dialectical analysis, or that 
such is the manner in which ice ordinarily 'interpret language of 
the kind. We must not apply to highly-wrought figures the 
laws we apply to ordinary language. We here charge our 
opponents with reversing the Jaws of language. All the expres- 
sions which God uses of future punishment in what we may call 

i lloroz Apoc iv. 21 8, ui. 443, it. 5. 



Everlasting Burnings, 31 

the legal documents of Scripture, — such expressions as ' death,' 
* destruction,' ' life,' etc. — they insist on interpreting as figures ; 
but the moment they come to a book which is figurative beyond 
perhaps any other book that was ever written, they insist 
on interpreting their favorite passages in it by the strictest laws 
of prose. It is but a hopeless cause that requires such handling 
as this. 

The way in which we will show the sense we put on the 
passages- in Revelation to be reasonable is this: We will 
present similar passages from other Scriptures, written in like 
strong language and analogical terms, to which no such in- 
terpretation can be given as that attributed by our opponents to 
these passages in Revelation, but which do bear a sense such as 
we have put upon them above. Our argument is that if one 
passage is capable of such an interpretation, and has such an in- 
terpretation put upon it by the Spirit who inspired it, we 
may lawfully allow these to have a similar meaning, and, 
reverencing the plainer testimony of other Scriptures, are bound 
to do so. 

We will draw our readers' attention to Jude, ver. t J, c even as 
Sodom and Gomorrha, and the cities about them in like manner, 
giving themselves over to fornication, and going after strange 
flesh, are set forth for an example, suffering the vengeance 
of eternal fire.'' We want to arrive at the sense of this passage. 
We will first say what this suffering of the Sodomites is not. It 
does not then, in the first place refer to anything they suffer, or 
may be thought to suffer in Hades, for the condition of the 
Sodomites in Hades is never alluded to in Scripture, and is there- 
fore no warning example set before men to learn from. In 
the second place, it does not refer to anything they may here- 
after suffer in hell, for that is to them confessedly, as to all sinners, 
a future thing, whereas what the text speaks of is something 
which they were suffering when Jude wrote, and had suffered 
before he wrote, and which had long been a plain and palpable 
warning to ungodly men. If it does not refer to either of them 
it is very evident what it does refer to. It means that pun- 
ishment, open to human sight, which began when the fire 
from heaven descended on the guilty cities, and which has 
remained in force through all the succeeding generations down 
to our own time, and will continue while the earth remains. 
It is their overthrow in the days of Lot, and their abiding 
condition ever since, which are here placed before the ungodly as 



32 Examination of Particular Texts. 

an example of what awaits them hereafter if they imitate Sodom. 
This view is not first presented by Jude, it is frequently met 
with in the older Scriptures. Thus in Deut. xxix. 23, the 
then existing condition of Sodom and Gomorrha, ' brimstone and 
salt and burning, that is not sown, nor beareth, nor any grass 
groiceth thereon ,' is held up as the resemblance to which the 
land of Israel will be reduced if they turn to idols. Similar 
allusions abound in Scripture. 1 In all of them we find the 
present unchanging condition of Sodom a favorite image to 
set forth either a like state of similar cities in this life or of 
the ungodly in the life to come.' 2 

What has been and is this state of Sodom? In the davs 
of Abraham four rich and populous cities flourished in the plain 
of Jordan. On a sudden, fire descended from heaven, and after 
a period of terror, regrets, and pain, the inhabitants were 
deprived of life. They and their works were burnt up, and this 
ruined, lifeless, hopeless condition has remained to the present 
time. ' The smell of the fire is still over the land." savs Tertul- 
lian. The whole transaction conveys the idea of conscious pain 
for a time, followed by ruin and death for all time. 

In what terms is this condition described"? Sodom and 
Gomorrha — an expression especially including the people of 
these cities — are described as l suffering the vengeance of eternal 
f.re? They suffered such vengeance in Lot's day, and have 
suffered it ever since. It is their eternal suffering from fire. 
But when we come to think of the state thus described, what is 
it r It is not endless life in pain. Pain and life were over in a 
very short time in the sulphurous fire, but life and joy have 
never since been seen where the destruction fell : death and des- 
olation have ever since reigned there. 3 This is, according to 
Jude, ' suffering the vengeance of eternal fire.' 

This passage from Jude then serves two purposes. First, 
it establishes our theory, for it represents the punishment of 
Sodom as an exact pattern of future punishment. Secondly, it is 
our guide to the interpretation of the passages in Revelation. 
The phrases, 'the smoke of their torment ascendeth up for 
ever and ever,' and, ' they shall be tormented day and night for 
ever,' applied to the objects of future punishment, are not more 
indicative of endless life and pain in hell than the phrase, 
buffering the vengeance of eternal fire,' applied to the pun- 

> Is. i. 9. xiii. 19; Jar. xlis. 18, L 40, 2 Pet ii. 6. " 2 Religions Tendencies, &c, by J. 
Grant, voL L p. 270. 3 Wisdom x. 7. Josephus, ■ Jewish War, 1 iv., viii. iy. 



Unquenchable Fire. 33 

ishment of the Sodomites, is indicative of their having lived 
in pain from Abraham's day to ours. The Greek verb * to 
torment' is used of things without life as well as of living 
beings. 1 The one idea, common to the passages compared, 
is the eternity of the ruin which sinners bring upon themselves. 
We may add, that this interpretation put on the passages 
in Revelation is required in order to bring that book into 
harmony with itself) since it, just as other Scriptures, describes 
the future condition of the ungodly as a state of death and 
destruction, as a being blotted out of the book of life. 2 

Let us turn to another passage, from which in all probability 
the imagery of Revelation was borrowed, and see if it does not 
fully bear out our interpretation. Isaiah, in his own grand poetical 
language, is describing the temporal judgments brought by God 
upon the land of Idumea. He says, 'the land thereof shall 
become burning pitch. t Jt shall not be quenched night nor day / 
the smoke thereof shall go up for ever? Here, as in Revelation, 
we have the smoke of judgment or torment going up for ever ! 
But would the advocates of Augustine's hell tell us that if we 
went to Idumea we should see people there who had been suffer- 
ing pain from some period subsequent to Isaiah's prophecy to 
the present time ? The poetical figure of a perpetual furnace 
and smoke merely conveys the idea of perpetual desolation, but 
by no means of endless life in pain. The present condition of 
Edom is the explanation of the poetic figure : its cities have 
fallen into ruin : the whole land is a desert. 3 Listen to Poole's 
comment on the text : ' it shall be irrecoverably ruined, and shall 
remain as a spectacle of God's vengeance to all succeeding ages? 
As Poole, the Augustinian, interprets Isaiah, so do we, who 
abhor Augustine's theory, interpret those passages in Revela- 
tion which are in all likelihood borrowed from Isaiah. We 
interpret Scripture by its own analogy. 

We are here naturally led to consider what it is that is really 
meant by the terms * eternal fire,' ' unquenchable fire,' so often 
applied to the fire of hell. We are not now considering the 
nature of the fire itself, whether it be identical with or analogous 
only to fire such as here consumes. What we are considering is 
whether, be this fire what it may, it continues throughout eter- 
nity to burn as it burns when the reprobates are first placed 
therein. The passage from Jude leads us to conclude that it 

* See original of Matt. jriy. 24. 2 Rev. iii. 5, xi. 18, xvii. 8, xx. 6. 
8 Smith's Dictionary. Art. 'Edom. 1 



34 Examination of Particular Texts. 

only burns while it has anything to consume. 1 The fire of 
Sodom is called an ' eternal fire,' but it only burned while aught 
remained of the guilty cities to be consumed. It could not be 
extinguished until then. Jordan poured upon it could not 
put out its flames : Abraham's prayers could not abate its force : 
mercy had put forward its last plea in the bosom of God. But 
when all had been reduced to ashes the fire went out, and the 
smoke ceased to rise, leaving behind an utter destruction which 
no lapse of time was to repair. It is thus that we are to view the 
unquenchable fire of hell. 

We are to consider that the term is one in common use. It is 
not confined to hell, or peculiar to theology. It is constantly 
applied to fire burning here on earth which is unquenchable, 
inasmuch as all human efforts cannot quench it, but which, when 
it has done its work of destruction, smoulders away and dies out. 
The classical scholar will remember the famous passage of Homer 
where the Trojans hurl * unquenchable fire' upon the Grecian 
ships, though but one of them was burnt, and that one only half 
consumed. 2 In the very same way it is constantly used in Scrip- 
ture. When God in one place declares that his anger would be 
poured out ' upon man and upon beast, and upon the fruit of the 
ground, and shall burn, and shall not be quenched,' and in 
another that He will ' kindle a fire in the gates of Jerusalem, and 
it shall not be quenched,' 3 He means that his wrath was to con- 
tinue till man and beast were destroyed, and the fire was to con- 
tinue till the gates of Jerusalem were consumed. Then wrath 
ceased because it had spent its force, and the fire went out 
because it had eaten up all on which it could prey. 4 So we are 
to understand that unquenchable fire which is the terrible fate of 
the lost. Their fire is not quenched. It preys upon them with 
relentless force. No cries on the part of the damned arrest it : no 
prayers ascend from the redeemed for the sin which they know 
to be unto eternal death : no feelings of pity in God's bosom 
interfere to check its course. It burns on, consuming, preying, 
reducing, until it has consumed and burnt all. "When it has 
spent its force it dies out for want of food, leaving behind it the 
endless sign of the destruction which it has brought on fallen 
archangel, and angel, and man. This is the second death. But 
we can bear to look upon it because it is death. We are not 
looking upon a picture which would overturn reason and banish 

i Scripture Revelations of a Future State. 7tn edition, p. 234. * 11. in. 123, 2*4. 
* Jer. vii. 20, xvil. 27. * Ezek. xx. 47, 4S ; Ecclus. xxviu. 23. 



Distinctions in Future Punishmoit. 35 

peace from all who beheld it. Life has left the realms of the lost. 
The reprobate felt, but do not continue to feel the consuming 
flames. These prey upon the dead until dust and ashes cover 
the floor of the furnace of hell. 1 

In Origin's view of the future, a view now fast spreading, we 
see the real cause of the emphatic, repeated, awful' declarations 
of the eternity of future punishment. That view, so pleasing to 
fallen human nature, was the vieAV against which the Spirit 
of God laid down in Scripture the warnings of everlasting 
destruction, of unquenchable tire. Experience has proved the 
necessity of this. Even in the face of these Scriptures men 
are found to advocate the hope of a restoration from hell. Far 
more than Augustine's theory does the view here maintained 
root out this false delusive hope. So long as men believe that 
life is not extinguished in hell, so long they will nourish 
hope. 2 They will cherish the idea that somewhere down through 
the ages, when the groans of hell have been beating sadly, cease- 
lessly, at the gates of heaven, the message of mercy and deliv- 
erence may again be sent down, even as God used to send it 
of old to Israel groaning beneath the bondage of Egypt, Philistia, 
and Canaan. Death extirpates all such hopes. 'Corruption has 
a hope of a kind of removal, but death has everlasting ruin. 9 * 



CHAPTER VII. 

DISTINCTIONS IN FUTURE PUNISHMENT. 

While we see one universal result — namely, death — to arise 
from future punishment, we are also told in Scripture of vary mo- 
circumstances attendant on it which are necessary to be consid- 
ered, in order to enable us to form an adequate conception of its 
nature and variety. 

Hell is not to all a sudden cessation of existence. There is life 
in that fearful prison, though it continues not for ever. This is 
shown by the numerous texts which speak of weeping and 
wailing, of regrets and anguish on the part of the damned. As 
here life goes before death, and as here regrets and pains precede 
and produce death, so we find it to be, on the part of many 

1 Mai. iv. 3; Theophilus Ant. 116 A, edition of Justin Martyr. s Milton, 'Par. Lost, 1 
li. 221-337. 3 Pastor of Hernias. Sim. vi. c. 11. Apostolic Fathers. Clark, 1868. 



36 Distinctions in Future Punishment. 

at least, in the scene of future doom. The children of the kin^- 
dom, cast into its outer darkness, gnash their teeth when they 
think of those who have come from east and west, and enjoy 
what they have lost. The unworthy guest at the marriage feast 
of Christ is in despair that he is not suffered to continue there. 
The despisers of the offers of redemption, be they Jews or 
Gentiles, behold their astounding folly, and marvel at its great- 
ness. The unfaithful servant has time to bewail his want of 
fidelity, and the hypocrite to see that the portion he has chosen 
is a bitter and a hard one, ere all — sooner or later — sink into that 
state where wonder and remorse and pain and shame are lulled 
in the unconscious sleep of the second death. 1 
* And here we must remark that all the warnings of 'weeping 
and gnashing of teeth ' are addressed to the rejectors of proffered 
grace. Not one of them is addressed to such as the men of 
Sodom and Gomorrha, Nineveh, and Babylon, were in old times ; 
to such as the men of Cabul and Bokhara, Teheran and Tim- 
buctoo, are at the present day. The same holds good, we 
believe, of every especial warning found in Scripture. 

Now it is doubtless in these circumstances that we will 
find room for that great distinction in guilt, and consequent pun- 
ishment, which Scripture repeatedly insists on. Its cities of 
Chorazin and Bethsaida; its children of the kingdom; its 
refusers of an apostle's message ; its hypocrites trading on a false 
profession ; its men aware of their master's will ; are held up as 
exceeding in guilt the ignorant offender, the undesigning sinner, 
the rejecter of an unauthenticated messenger, the uncovenanted 
transgressor, the men of Tvre and Sidon. For the former 
are the many stripes ; for the latter the few. 2 Our theory 
affords ample room for that great distinction in punishment 
which God will hereafter make. 

And here we find a perfect analogy in the circumstances 
of the first death. This world is a world of death. All here are 
doomed to die, and all suffer death. In this there is no distinc- 
tion. But in the circumstances of dying there is infinite 
variety. One man lives close upon a thousand years ere he 
yields to death ; to another the first breath lie breathes in 
the world is his last. Between Methusaleh and the infant of a 
moment's life lies every variety of duration. Again ; one dies as 
though he were going to rest in sleep. Another is racked with 

1 Matt. via. 12, xxii. 13, xxiv. 51 ; Luke xiii. 28: Acts xiii 41. 
'-' Matt. xi. 22, viil. 12, x. 15; Luke xx. 47, xii. 48; John ix. 41. 



Few and Many Strijyes. *T 

pains, year after year, by day and by night, which make 
him curse the weary life that is so hardly parted from. Between 
these deaths lies every variety of comparative unconsciousness, 
inconvenience, uneasiness, weariness, and anguish. A like dis- 
tinction we are positively told will exist in the ' second death,' 
and our theory affords for it perfect scope. To some this death 
may be an instantaneous process, a momentary transition 
from one state to another, like the infant who opens his eyes on 
this world and then closes them for ever. Here may be the 
amount of conscious pain for the myriads upon myriads of young 
and old who, in heathen, and even in Christian countries, 
from the inevitable moral darkness with which their circum- 
stances had surrounded them, scarce knew wrong from right. 
To others the process of the second death may be more or 
less lengthened until we arrive at the case of the greatest 
human offenders, or that more aggravated one of the spirits who 
fell from heaven and drew weaker man along with them in 
their fall. In our theory we see how it may be, as it cer- 
tainly will be, more tolerable for some than for others in the day 
of judgment; how, while stripes many and sore fall on some, on 
others they may fall so few and so light as scarcely to be 
felt at all. 

It has been doubtless remarked, from several expressions 
of ours, that we hold that the ultimate fate of devils will be the 
same as that of the reprobate.. We have no doubt such is 
the case, and all Scripture tends to that end. They share 
in that judgment which awaits the ungodly. The everlasting 
fire which consumes the wicked is that which has been prepared 
for the devil and his angels. They themselves look forward 
to be * destroyed' in hell. The pains which they dread are 
those which the ungodly will endure, and which result in death. 
The final extinction of evil to which God has pledged Himself in 
his word compels us to hold their destruction. 1 Nor can 
one single reason be advanced why God should not do this. 
The fire which is able to bring to dissolution that human spirit 
which man's power cannot reach, is able also to bring to dissolu- 
tion that angelic spirit which is probably more tenacious of life. 
And we have thus in Scripture a far more satisfactory view 
of the final state of retribution than is afforded us by popular 
theology or poetic imagination. Devils are not the tyrants 

12 Pet. ii. 4; Judev. 6; Matt. xxv. 41 ; Mark i. 24; Lnke iv. 34; Epistle of Barnabas, 
C. xxL, Jastin Martyr Dial. Tryp. p. 264 ; 329 A ; 319 B ; 477, 327 D ; 350 B. 



38 Distinctions in Future Punishment 

of hell. Devils do not exercise there an endless power over the 
victims of their fraud. They are only punished in hell with 
a severity proportioned to their guilt. With fearful reason 
they look forward to it, not as a scene of further triumph 
but of unmitigated woe. They see, in all probability, the 
world whom they had seduced from God — the greater part of it 
speedily, all of it at one time or other — reduced to the original 
unfeeling elements of their being, while their stronger nature re- 
tains that vigorous life which makes it but the more susceptible 
of pain. The last being that retains the misery of existence 
may be that archfiend, Satan, the leader in heaven's rebellion, 
the prime mover in earth's falling away. When the lost race of 
man has long ceased to feel; when his fellow angels have, 
one by one, been reduced to the state of death; he may still 
survive, longing for the time when he too may lay aside a life 
which is only one of pain. 

The view here advocated derives strong confirmation from its 
being in complete analogy with nature, i. e. with God's ordinary 
working. While those who seek God find Him, and in finding 
Him find life, and through His gracious plan of redemption 
are advanced in place and glory ; we also find, with regard 
to others, lives innumerable lost, and in the case of angels an 
entire race blotted out of life. God and nature are not here at 
strife. 1 We find in nature that death and destruction are God's 
usual agents in removing from their place things animate and 
inanimate as soon as they cease to discharge the part for which 
they were intended. Throughout the wide domain of nature the 
law of death is in ceaseless operation. Of fifty seeds but one 
may bear fruit. Of the lower animals death after life is the 
universal law. Whole races of living things have long ceased to 
exist. 

' From scarped cliff and quarried stone, 
She cries, a thousand types are gone.' 

In our view, God does but apply to higher races for their sin 
that which he has applied to lower races who knew no sin. The 
grand distinction between these and us is, that we may see and 
know God who is Life and the source of all lower life. 2 If we 
turn from him we turn from life. We deny and renounce 
our real distinction, and are treated as that which we have made 
ourselves to become. Mere individual life is not precious in 

1 Tennyson ' In Memoriam." : Irenasue, iv., xxxvii., lxxv. 



The Divine Justice, 39 

GocTs sight. If he scatters it with a prodigal hand, He removes 
it with a hand that is just as free. In the myriads of human 
beings reduced in hell to death, in the extinction of the fallen 
angels, we do but find a particular application of a universal law. 
Lower creatures know not God, and fade away out of life. 
Higher intelligences knew Him, turned from Him, made them- 
selves like the beasts, and like beasts are treated. Hell will add 
its fossil remains to those of the quarries of the earth. 



CHAPTER VIII. 

THE D1YIXE JUSTICE. 



We now approach a very solemn question, the question of 
Divine justice. We approach it with the deep reverence that 
becomes a creature when he scans and judges the conduct of his 
Maker, but also with the confidence which is becoming one who 
is invited by his Maker to this inquiry. It is indeed said 
that we are not able to judge of God's ways, and this, no doubt, 
is often true ; but it is true only of those dealings of His with us 
with which we are imperfectly acquainted, or which, from 
their nature, are above our comprehension. The present subject 
belongs to neither of these categories. Future punishment is a 
matter fully set before us. We are told its cause and nature : 
told to ponder on and study it. We are not treated as children 
incapable of forming an opinion as to what is just or unjust 
in God. Called upon to love, respect, and confide in Him, 
we must be capable of judging of His character, of His love, His 
mercy, His wisdom, His justice. He has Himself appealed to us 
to do so, admitted His creature's scrutiny as the exercise of 
a right, and this not merely in the case of His faithful people, but 
of those who were alienated from Him. 1 In the human breast 
there is a true sense of what is just, and God not only allows it, 
but insists upon its exercise towards Himself. He has told 
us His character : He challenges us to bring any line of conduct 
attributed to Him to this test. In the question of future 
punishment we have the highest case on which any tribunal 
shall have ever sat; and we may be sure that the Judge of 

J Ezek. xviii. 29; Gen. xviii. 23-23. 



40 The Divine Justice. 

all the earth will do right, not merely in His own eyes but 
in those of all his intelligent creation ; of the angels who stand 
round his throne, of the redeemed who rejoice in their accept- 
ance, of the very damned who listen to their sentence. 

What is our question ? It is this. Is pain, inflicted through 
eternity, endured without any hope of an end, no nearer to 
its close when numberless cycles have passed than when the first 
groan was uttered, — is such a just punishment for any conceiv- 
able amount of sin committed by the worst of men ? Man 
did not ask for life : it was given him without his knowledge or 
consent. Can any abuse of this unasked-for gift justify the 
recompense of an existence spent in unending agony ? 

We must put the question on its proper grounds. The ablest 
modern defenders of eternal life in hell have put it on a false 
issue. They have done so in two main respects, urged on 
by their inability to justify their theory in its naked light. The 
first of these we will give in the words of William Archer 
Butler, whose view is adopted by Dr. Salmon, Professor Mansel, 
and others. ' The punishments of hell J says Butler, ' are but the 
perpetual vengeance that accompanies the sins of hell. An 
eternity of wickedness brings with it an eternity of woe. The 
sinner is to suffer for everlasting, but it is because the sin itself is 
as everlasting as the suffering.'' 1 

It may fairly be questioned whether, according to any princi- 
ples of Divine or human law, the lost, in hell are capable of 
sinning. 2 We do not believe they are. Out of and beyond 
all law, they are incapable of transgressing law. 3 But independ- 
ently of this, it is sufficient to say of the above fearful view that 
it contradicts the Scriptures. Not once or twice, but over 
and over again, it tells us that the punishment of the future 
is for the sins' of the present time. 41 If we think it too great, we 
are not at liberty to throw in the sins of the future, real or 
imaginary, to justify the punishment of the future. If we 
cannot defend man's future treatment as being a just award 
for his present conduct, we cannot justify it at all. It is a piece 
of the coolest effrontery for us to present as a reason for God's 
conduct what God has not Himself presented when explaining to 
man His judicial conduct. Just fancy an earthly judge sen- 
tencing a criminal to a punishment too severe for the offense 

1 Butler's W. A., Sermons, 2nd series, on 'Everlasting Punishment.' Salmon's. Dr., 
' Sermons,' p. 10 : Hansel's ' Bampton Lectures.' pp. 22-23 ; 225, 226. Pollok's ' Course of 
Time, 1 B. x., Dvright's ' Theology,' Sermon, clxii. 2 See Article ' Sin.' Fairbairn's k Im- 
perial Bible Dictionary.' 3 i j hn iii. 4. * Matt. xxv. 41, 42 ; Rom. ii. 6 ; 2 Cor. v. 10. 



The Question. 41 

committed, and then gravely justifying his sentence by the 
observation that the criminal icould be sure to deserve it all 
by his conduct in gaol ! Yet such is the judicature, unworthy 
of a Jeffreys, which learned professors of theology and doctors of 
divinity ascribe to the Judge of the whole earth ! 

Nor does it relieve God in the smallest measure from the 
charge of injustice to say that future punishment will but follow 
that law of nature which inextricably links together sin and 
misery. 1 We will not allow the believer to shield himself under 
the cant of modern infidelity. The laws of nature are the laws 
of God. For all their consequences, after they have worked 
their uniform work for ages, He is just as responsible as when 
He first ordained them, or as when He departs from them by an 
alteration of law or a miraculous interference. So Bishop But- 
ler argues in the place above referred to. If the laws of nature 
were to bring on the sinner a punishment greater than his sin 
deserved, it is God Himself who would be doing so. 

^The simple question then is, could man by any conduct 
here deserve to suffer throughout eternity pain and torment 
to which only the worst pain he suffers here can afford a true 
parallel ? Would the agonies to which the martyr was subjected 
for an hour be only sufficient for the sinner if drawn out through 
the eternal age ? Would it be just in God to inflict this on any 
single creature of his hand, on any being who would never have 
had life at all if the Maker had not called him from his clay ? 
The verdict of the human heart — in its fierce denial — in its secret 
recoil — answers !N"o. ' Eternal pain,' says ^Augustine, ' seems 
harsh and unjust to human sense.' ' With the majority of men 
of the world,' says Butler, ' this doctrine seems, when they think 
at all about it, monstrous, disproportioned, impossible.' It seems 
so, in the same writer's mind, to others besides men of the world, 
to men who do not fear this doom for themselves ; ' it would 
blanch the intellect,' reduce the mind of the Christian to a state 
of idiotcy, deprive him of life, were he but ' adequately to 
conceive it.' 2 If God were now to ask man whether his conduct 
on this hypothesis were just, man would with one voice reply 
that it was not. \ , 

The history of human religious thought shows man's ineradic- 
able sense of the burning wrong of this fearful theory. If Plato, 

* Bp. Butler's 'Analogy,' chap. ii. ; Mansel's ' Bampton Lectures,' pp. 22. 3. Salmon's 
'• Sermons,' p. 9. 2 Augustine's l City of God,' xxi. 12. ; Butler's, W. A„ ' Sermons,' pp. 
376-383. ~ ' 



12 27 

ion from Egypt, taught a Tartarus with 
—hence none could come forth, he taught it 

an infinitesimally small portion of men. For most — even for 
the homicide, the parricide, and the matricide — he had his 
Azherusian Lake, whence, after a purgative process, they issued 
forth again to the upper air. If Augustine adopted his great 
masters abode of unending pain, he adopted also his purgatory, 
from whence there was a way to heaven. If the Church of Rome 

sanctioned the theory of Augustine, she practically holds out 
its I errors only to those without her pale of safety : for her own 
millions she has, at the worst, the fires of a finite period. The 

rtion of Augustine's hell did but drive the gentler mind 
of Origen to the notion of a wider purgatory than Rome's 
or Augustine's, where even devils should be prepared to resume 
their place in heaven. The Churches of the Reformation have 
jrr.erally followed Augustine in his hell and denied his purga- 
tory, but at all times within their bosom has been a struggle 
against the dominant doctrine, and even from those who main- 
tained it it has generally commanded only a sullen, uncheerful 

at S :eh men as Tillotson, Robert Hall, Isaak Taylor, Albert 
Barnes, while they accepted the theory loved it not. We 
constantly find its recent defenders candidly confessing that 

h all their hearts thev would wish that it was a lie. 1 The 

modern mind, shaken in religious faith, denies the inspiration of 

a book which is supposed to teach the monstrous creed. V 7 

those who will not throw away their faith in mans future, 

the theory ol Orige^, with all its consequences, bids fair, if only 

confronted with the fearful nightmare of Augustine, to take the 

place which the authority of the latter father has so long given 

to h The modern defenders of Augustine's theory 

shrink from putting forward a vindication of it in its plain 

and hideous aspect. One after another of the arguments on 

which it has heretofore been defended they have abandoned 

of their reason, or abhorrent to their sense of 

:e. 2 

Our view needs no vindication, does not compel us to keep 

it discreetly in the background, reduces us to no subterfuge to 

r its consea x uences. It does not force us to advance a 

"hich we feel unworthy of a child, or faintly to defend 

■ EWbMMfe * S EHnana, 1 Preface ; * Religious Tendencies of the Times,' by J. Grant, 
- '. | - Si. "TDkits - - .non on w Everlasting Punishment ; ' Dr. Salmon's ' Sermons,' 
"~., on • Future Punishment' Introduction. 



Origin, Duration, and End of Evil. 43 

the justice of a procedure which our heart whispers to us is only 
worthy of hell. By it the next life's dealings with the sinner 
will but follow the analogy of this. He who scans the course of 
nature may by it anticipate that future course which Reve- 
lation opens to our view. According to it God's ways with the 
si?mer are equal They are severe, but they are just. They are 
full of awe, but they can be contemplated with calmness. They 
show the award of a justice in whose consequences we can 
rejoice. Their issue in eternal death, if it brings the sigh of sad- 
ness, brings also the deep full breathing of infinite relief. We 
require neither the ' purgatory ' of Augustine nor the c universal 
restoration' of Origen. Looking on the calmed face of death, 
we will say, 'it is well.' The woes, the agony, the despair 
of life are passed away from its features with the sin that 
produced them. 



CHAPTER IX. 

OBIGIX, DUB ATI OX, AND EXD OF EVIL. 

Ijf the predicted extinction of evil we have another conclusive 
proof of the truth of our theory. Evil is not to be eternal, "We 
are told in God's Word that it has had a beginning and 
shall have an end. Neither the Manichseism of Manes, asserting 
for evil an eternal past and future, nor the Semi-Manichseism of 
Augustine, asserting for it an eternal future, is true. God has 
pledged his word and his power that it shall be abolished 
and destroyed. He has promised a ' restitution of all things ' by 
the mouth of all his holy prophets since the world began. A 
time shall come when the wicked shall not be, when his place 
shall nowhere in God's world be found. A time shall come 
when all things shall once more be 'very good,' when iniquity 
shall have an end, when the pure eyes of God shall no more 
be offended by its sight. A time shall come when they who 
would not glorify God shall be silent in darkness, and when 
everything that has breath shall praise the Lord. 1 

Here the theory of Augustine is at direct issue with Scripture. 
The theory of Origen indeed provides an extinction of evil, and 
in this point lies its great and only strength. It is, however, set 

i Acts iii. 21 ; P$. xxxvii 10; Hab. J. 13; 1 Sam. ii. 9 : Ps. cl. 6. 



\ 



44 Origin, Duration, and End of Evil, 

aside on other grounds. But here the theory of eternal life 
in hell contradicts the whole tenor of the Bible. It denies the 
restitution of all things. It asserts that evil shall be eternal in 
God's world, and that iniquity shall never have an end. It tells 
us that God's eyes shall throughout eternity be offended with 
the sight of evil and his ears pained with the sounds of blas- 
phemy. It denies that the wicked will ever be silent in dark- 
ness, and that everything that has breath shall praise the Lord. 
It sets apart a portion of God's universe, not for the destruction 
of evil, but for its everlasting preservation. According to some 
of its advocates the evil existing in fallen spirits and reprobate 
men will receive constant accession throughout all future ages, 
so that it may become doubtful whether good or evil predomi- 
nates in a world over which an omnipotent and holy God 
is allowed by these men to reign. 1 

Our theory fully answers the requirements of Scripture. It 
teaches a restitution of all things, and an extinction of evil. To 
us it seems to do even more than this. It appears to afford 
a reason for what after all is the grand mystery in connec- 
tion with evil, viz: its permission for any period in God's 
world. The origin of evil is accounted for by the freedom of 
will which belongs to all creatures of loftier nature and nobler 
destiny than the brutes. The obliteration of evil is provided for 
in the Scriptural truth of eternal death for all evil-doers who 
have not been restored to God. The permission of evil for the 
period of time from the angelic fall to the final consummation of 
all things is therefore the chief problem to be solved in the 
history of evil. Faith in such a God as we have tells us 
that the permission of evil must have some wise gracious end 
in view : 

Oh, yet we trust that somehow good 
Will be the final goal of ill. 

We will now endeavor to show that such is the goal of ill, 
though our theory leads us to a different conclusion _ from 
that which Tennyson would fain arrive at in his exquisite 
* In Memoriam.' 

We must ever keep in mind the great object of punishment: 
With a just ruler this object is never pain inflicted in a spirit of 
hatred, or pain 'greater than the offense deserved. With a just 
ruler retribution, no doubt, is an end, but it is the least end 

i Letter of C. H. Waller. 4 The Eock ' of December 29, 18G8. 



Object of Punishment. 45 

of punishment? His great end is prevention. In the punish- 
ment of offenders he always has more regard to the law-keepers 
than to the law-breakers. Protection to the former in their 
lawful callings ; warning to them against the imitation of crime ; 
these are the great ends aimed at by wise and just rulers in 
punishment of actual crime. Regard to these will be the great 
ruling motive in the regulation of punishment. Regard to these 
will operate most powerfully on the treatment of the criminal. 
At one time it will demand a sternness in punishment all but 
productive of actual injustice to the individual punished. Regard 
for society may, in another aspect, mitigate to a most serious 
extent the punishment justly due to his crime. But regard 
to society in all its branches and all its interests is the grand 
aim in all wise human legislation on crime ; and that legislator 
has shown the highest wisdom who, while never transgressing the 
limits of justice, has so arranged his penal code that it has had 
the greatest effect possible in protecting the law-respecting com- 
munity in their minutest rights, and providing that they shall 
never degenerate into the condition of the law-breaking classes. 
All severity, short of injustice, is not only wise but is most 
merciful, that has this effect. 

Now it is in this light that we are to view future punishment, 
together with that long permission of evil, with all its attendant 
circumstances, its glitter, its pleasures, its supposed advantages, 
its delusiveness, its pains, which we have seen in the history 
of our own race as well as in our partial glimpses into the 
history of a higher, and which will doubtless in all their real 
bearing remain on eternal record in the annals of God's great 
world. To say that what we call the fall of angels was the first 
appearance of moral evil, is to say what cannot with certainty be 
affirmed. All that we can say with certainty is that it was 
the beginning of that outburst of moral evil with which we 
are connected,, and in which, as regards us, the redemption 
of Christ has interposed. Our opinion is that the outburst 
of evil, which began with the angelic fall and spread on to 
the fall of man, is positively the first appearance of moral evil in 
the universe of God. But we cannot here dogmatise. "What we 
are much more strongly persuaded of is that, if not the first, 
it will be the last. We know from Scripture that this outburst 
of evil will be obliterated and become extinct. We think we see, 
with almost equal certainty, that evil will break out no more. 

But God, in dealing with the higher order of his creatures, is 



46 Origin, Duration, and End of Evil, 

dealing, not with lifeless matter, not with living things walking 
by a law of necessity, but with living creatures under the high 
and elevating, but also most perilous condition of a free will. 
Free to choose the good, and rise on the wings of goodness to 
God its source, and to enjoy the immortality ot God. As free to 
choose the evil, and sink beneath its weight to depths of utter 
darkness. Nor is this an imaginary evil, a theoretical possibility, 
to be discussed as a school problem, but never to be met with in 
reality. Angels — we know not how many, but we know that 
they are many — who once walked in holiness, used their free will 
to range themselves in opposition to God. Man. a weaker and a 
lower creature, yet inexperienced and unsuspecting, also uses his 
free will to depart from God. And so, in these various ways, in 
these various shades of original guilt, sin entered into God's uni- 
verse, and produced evil effects, of which we know something 
from what we daily hear and see, but whose full consequences 
are only known to God. 

But this is not all. There is the very same possibility and 
danger of further fall that there ever was. It may be that the 
angelic world of past creation are so fortified and strengthened 
by what they have already seen of the evil of sin that with them 
there is no moral possibility of further fall. But we have no 
reason for supposing that among the spheres are no creatures 
such as we. Nor have we the smallest reason for supposing that 
God has come to the limit of his creative energy and will. 
He is not the inactive God of an Epicurean philosophy, reposing 
in dreary self-satisfied contemplation. He is a God who delights 
to be at work, and the spirit he breathes into all is a love of 
work. 1 Look at the earth. It affords innumerable evidences of 
his busy hand and brain. Look at the stars. Doubtless they 
show the same ceaseless energy of God. But we know that He 
is not content with the creation only of the lower organizations. 
He delights to form creatures that know with a conscious 
love their Maker, and in this knowledge rise higher and higher, 
nearer and yet more near to their source. Who can place limits 
to the future expansion of our race when the consummation 
has come ? "Who can say with any faint shadow of probability 
that God will close his creation with man ? Even while we 
write, or while we read, there may be reproducing in some 
distant planet, whose geological changes have come to their 
required perfection, the fac-simile of the scene in Eden sii 

i John y. 17. 



Free Will 47 

thousand years ago. Or who can say that it may not be ours as 
the ages of our blessed future roll on — our own days of marrying 
and giving in marriage existing only in the memory — to see 
what angels saw here once, a figure of noble front and faultless 
form rising from the earth in the majesty of perfect manhood, 
and God placing in his thrilling grasp the hand of woman as 
lovely in face as she is innocent in mind, and saying in words 
that should cover with shame all who derogate from God's holy 
ordinance of marriage, 'Increase and multiply, and replenish the 
world I have given you.' 

But these are races made under free will ! It may be that 
some of them in their beginning are no higher than we were 
in ours. Eve does not seem to have been before the fall much 
wiser than she was after it. A woman without guile, without 
suspicion, without experience, loving, curious, credulous. Do 
you reject the picture ? It is not ours : it is what we see on the 
canvas of Scripture. Adam was apparently in much resembling 
many of his sons. Ardent, hasty, impetuous, at a beautiful 
woman's solicitation he threw away, with open eyes, duty 
and loyalty : without her he will not live — with her he will die. 
And what were the consequences? We read them — outside 
Eden, in the Deluge, at Sodom, in Potiphar's house, in the wars 
of Canaan, on the hill of Calvary, at the siege of Jerusalem, 
in the shouts of the Goths and Yandals, in the Crusaders' wars, 
in the massacre of Bartholomew, in the snows of Russia, in 
the glittering scenes of heartless vanity, in the morbid passions 
and stunted affections of conventual imprisonment, in the gamb- 
ling tables of Baden, in the lust markets of Paris and of London. 
We read them in our world's history of crime, and sin, and 
sorrow, and death. 

Now the divine code of punishment, from the expulsion from 
Eden and the growth of the thistle down to the closing punish- 
ment of hell, has regard to the various, complicated, and universal 
interests of the higher creation, wherever it may now or will 
hereafter exist. It is not solely, we say it is not chiefly, for 
those to whom it shall be said — 'Depart into everlasting fire.' 
We are by no means prepared to say that if fallen man, aye, and 
even fallen angels, had alone been in question, their treatment 
by God might not have been widely different. Had they alone 
been in question we dare not confine the efforts at their recovery 
to those which have been actually made. Christ might in that 
ca-2 have taken hold of angels, instead of putting forth redemp 



48 Origin, Duration, and End of Evil. 

tion only for the sons of Abraham, Man's day of grace might 
not in that case have been confined to his life here from the 
cradle to the grave, but grace might have followed him on from 
age to age, and world to world, ere it ceased to strive to 
win back those who had once offered to God the pure incense 
of a creature's praise, who had once felt the ennobling emotion of 
the heart's love and worship of God, 

So it has not "been. Angels fell. No saving hand was 
stretched from the throne to raise them up; no Son of God went 
forth to war for them. Man felh The Son rose up from 
the place of honor, and said to his Father, 'Here am I, send me,' 
and He laid aside his majesty, and He emptied himself, and 
He became a man, and for man He bore shame, and rejection, 
and the death upon the cross. 'Not in vain,' sounds forth 
the voice of grateful love which has been growing and swelling 
from the small voice outside the gates of Eden to the voice 
of many waters within the gates of the New Jerusalem. But 
how many left behind ! How many voices silent ! How many 
pulsations of life stilled for evermore ! 

Now, what we say is this. Doubtless with a merciful view 
to others — to others, perhaps, as far exceeding the number 
of the lost as the sands of all old ocean's shores exceed those of 
its smallest strand — has the punishment of the various classes 
consigned at the Judgment to hell been decreed. In that 
of angels will be seen the danger of one irrevocable step, where 
no hand was put forth to save, where, perhaps, no wish was ever 
felt to return. As regards men, some in all ages, even the 
darkest, were saved from the effects of a step which, in their 
case, was not irrevocable ; but how various the degrees of guilt 
and opportunity among others, all of whom yet endured one 
irrevocable sentence ! To some Christ was preached with all 
the circumstances that could win back the heart, with all the 
earnestness that could secure the love. No response came from 
that wilful heart ; it closed up all the avenues that could lead to 
repentance, and went on resolutely to perdition. ' But,' it might 
be suggested, 'at least there will be such an effort made; we 
shall not, if we fall, find ourselves ushered into a doom of which 
we know little beyond what some faint indistinct fears and 
misgivings may darkly insinuate.' Yet even such God's 
dealings with our race show us may be the case. For ages 
He left the generations of the world to themselves. A glim- 
mering tradition, a darkened conscience, nature's indications 



The Severity of God. 49 

of a Great Being in whom love and, justice, and judgment, 
and power had each a place ; these were all myriads had to guide 
them to the brink of that last step which each one must take for 
himself, and by himself, into the dark world beyond. We do 
not affirm or believe of the heathen that all are lost; but wo 
do know from Scripture that, as a rule, their future is without 
hope. Light enough to condemn, but not enough to save. 
Light so little as to reduce their guilt to its minimum, but not to 
make them guiltless; and yet with this small amount of light 
and of guilt they endure the second and endless death. And 
who dares say, with Christ's words in his ears, that none of these 
lost ones would have heard and hailed to life eternal the words 
of Christ's Gospel, if they had been addressed to them by 
the Master or by his disciples. From Sodom and Gomorrha, 
from Tyre and Sidon, He tells us, souls would have sprung forth 
to the living call which was heard and unheeded by the callous 
hearts of Chorazin and Capernaum. 1 But no such call was 
heard amid the vice of Sodom : no such call mingled with 
the din of the mariners of Tyre, or with the beating of its waves. 
They sinned without law, and they perish without law ; for 
them it will be more tolerable than for others in the day of 
judgment, but they will not for all that escape its endless 
sentence. 

We acknowledge that there is severity in this. Augustine's 
sentence against such is one of the blackest tyranny and 
injustice/ even in the Scriptural sentence of death there is 
severity. But we cannot quarrel with severity, if it have no 
taint of injustice. God tells us that He sometimes acts with 
severity. 2 If He had not told us so in his Word we should have 
known it from his other great Book of Nature, whose pages 
have been open to all eyes, and in which lessons of severity are 
read as it enters each age's records on its tablet of stone. 
Severity in the future world, if it be not unjust, is no argument 
against any religious theory. If any one will say it is, he must 
take his stand on atheistic ground. And poor after all is the 
assurance which atheism can afford. If here is life which no 
God gave us, who can say we might not find such a life beyond 
the grave ? If here on earth are, as no doubt there are, places 
which may vie with almost any pictures of a future hell, in 
misery, guilt, and despair, will the atheist tell us that such may 
not exist in the hereafter as well ? Even for him it is better to 

1 Matt. xi. 21. 2 Rom. xi 22. 



50 Origin, Duration, and End of Evil. 

come "back to a belief in God. But with the theist we will allow 
of no argument against a theory which has in it the element 
of severity. Let him first eliminate severity from his booh 
of God, his inspired record, his infallible interpreter of divine 
secrets, the roll of nature through her mighty annals, before 
we will hear of one word of complaint from him, that in 
the Christian's book of God there is the record of severity 
past or to come. 

And may we not even here see mercy beaming forth ? In all 
judgment we believe that God remembers mercy, and that 
mercy is kept full in mind in the judgment on fallen angels, and 
reprobate men of every shade of guilt. God's higher order 
of creation have all to walk along the perilous course of free 
will in order to attain each the end of their being. There are 
rocks, shoals, quicksands by their way. Each rock has wit- 
nessed the wr£ck of some gallant ship ; each shoal is strewn with 
fragments; each quicksand has swallowed up brave beating 
hearts. But straightway has risen up the beacon on the head- 
land, the lighthouse on the reef, the deep-toned bell floating 
over the sands and sending its solemn warning across the 
treacherous waves ; and fleets traverse in safety where now one 
and now another noble vessel had been dashed in pieces and 
gone down. "We feel satisfied that we are not drawing on 
imagination for what we say. We know that in the path which 
race after race has to tread there is danger of falling. We know 
that, called to go up higher, even to the top of God's mount, 
they may fall headlong. "We are satisfied that the divine juris- 
prudence regards the welfare of the great numbers as its para- 
mount consideration. We see the important bearing of future 
punishment as it is revealed in Scripture, severe but never 
unjust, on this widely stretching interest of unbounded space, of 
eternal duration. We see how every shade of severity tells on 
some vast destiny of the future, from the severity which pun- 
ishes where the hands had been vainly stretched out all the day 
long, and the pleading voice had been mocked at, to the severity 
which punishes where no clear voice had ever spoken, and 
where, if such a voice had spoken, it would have been heard. 
To none, no, not the least guilty, is wrong done when God with- 
draws from the dim child of savage nature, or the as dim child 
of the dark circles which lie within the surrounding of our most 
vaunted civilization, the life He withdraws from the angel above 
him, from the beast scarce below him. But to numbers without 



Eden. 5 ] 

number may this act, to us bordering upon injustice but never 
entering one hairbreadth within its domain, be an act of 
supremest mercy, love, and wisdom ; for surely that conduct of 
God is most wise, most loving, most merciful, which, through a 
severity which the lost have ceased to feel, has made to count- 
less others the ennobling path of free will to be as safe as to the 
lower creatures is their ignoble path of necessity. 

Milton, in his ' Paradise Lost,' relates what he supposes may 
have passed in conversation between angels and our first parents 
before the fall. The mind of our great poet was traversing here 
that very line of thought which we have been endeavoring 
to pursue. He contemplated man without experience, yet of 
necessity placed in the post of danger. Eden had its joys, 
its peace, its progress : it must have its peril. Among the * trees 
yielding fruit, whose seed was in themselves,' which the earth 
brought forth on the third day of creation, we know that 
there were not two trees of an after growth. 1 We know that it 
was not till after man was made that they appeared. We also 
know that they appeared together, growing up at the same time 
side by side. "We know that simultaneously with the 'tree 
of life,' the emblem and pledge of safety, grew 'the tree of 
knowledge of good and evil,' the sign of a possible ruin. We 
know that this must be so, since man was made higher than the 
brutes, only a little lower than the angels. That tree of life con- 
ferring God's immortality, could not be hung with its precious 
fruit unless the deadly fruit of its neighbor tree hung close by. 
It is only saying that Eden was to man the land of free will, and 
therefore of a possible immortality and of as possible a death. 
Under such circumstances Milton brings before us Raphael 
relating to Adam the Angelic Fall. 2 It was the Angelic Archi- 
tect building up before the sailor's eye the beacon on the rock. It 
was the Ministering Spirit telling one child of free will of the pit- 
fall into which another and yet brighter child had fallen. It was 
without avail. As one race fell, so fell another; and down from 
that day to this, and from this day to the closing scene of earth's 
history, it has been seen, and will be seen, that the pathway of the 
higher creation is beset with danger. In life restored through 
Christ, in death incurred without Christ, this history of evil, in 
which the angelic and the human race are so blended and mixed 
up together, is concluded. 

It may be a part of our office in the coming age to point 

i Gen. i. 12 : ii. 9. * Par. Lost, B. v. 



52 Origin, Duration, and End of Evil. 

the moral of the marvelous parable to ears that hear it with 
more benefit than Adam listened to the tale brought from 
heaven by Raphael. We can then follow out to its close what 
the angel could only begin. We can then intertwine with the 
history of the higher race the fortunes of the lower, and carry on 
both to their common termination. We can tell of a race that 
in its fall had no redemption. We can tell of a redemption that 
visited another fallen race — of its miracles of grace, of its 
final victory — but also of its utter failure to save in unnumbered 
instances. We can tell them that not only obstinate guilt has its 
danger, but negligence, inexperience, ignorance, descending as an 
inheritance from generation to generation. And all this is told 
to races rejoicing in the first flush of that life which beats 
tumultuously in the new-created. K the sinner's ruin is their 
safety, and his destruction their safeguard against loss, then 
even the sinner's ruin was not in vain — even his devious footsteps 
have not been aimless, and we can find a great and precious 
truth in a Scripture at which we are sometimes inclined to 
stumble, that ' The Lord hath made all things for Himself, yea, 
even the wicked, for the day of evil.' 1 The great stumbling- 
block, the existence of evil, will be a stumbling-block no more. 
Evil is seen to exist, not, with Augustine, to be perpetuated for 
ever, but to be under the providence of the Great Sovereign and 
loving Father, its own eternal destruction. 

And this conclusion of the matter will exhibit to us the limits 
of that free will into whose bounds we have ventured with 
hesitating step to enter. We do not think that we have done so 
without a guide more trustworthy than led Virgil through 
the realms of the Shades, or guided Dante through his Purga- 
tory and Paradise. The free creature can defeat Divine good- 
?iessfor itself but no further. His own good he may refuse, his 
own evil he may choose, and yet there may be designs in the 
great scheme of Divine providence which in so doing he has 
unconsciously or unwillingly worked out. Such we know to be 
the case here. ' God maketh the wrath of man,' his sin, its end, 
to * praise Him.' The sinner has, no doubt, defeated God's 
goodness for himself, — thrust back the proffered hand that was 
full of blessing, — like the sullen child retired into the darkness 
from the cheerful room where the fire blazed brightly, and 
brothers and sisters played and laughed ; but he saw not a good 
glorious end which God brought about by his very conduct. 

1 Prov. xvj. 4. 



EUe of the Theory of Eternal Life in HeU. 53 

Other worlds behold us: other worlds hear of us. There 
is a universal history of creation with which the history of each 
part is inseparably linked. Earth's drama — its gladness and its 
sadness, its sin and its holiness, its life and its death, its redemp- 
tion embraced and rejected — is not an unconnected episode of a 
great poem, but is a mighty transaction of time, in which 
all worlds and all beings take a share — God, and angels, and 
men — and which is to bear with a mighty bearing upon the ages 
of the future. So it is represented in Scripture. The puny 
sceptic, blear-eyed and short-sighted, may sneer at the thought 
of the trouble which our world is said to have occasioned in the 
councils of heaven. Not so they who stand near the throne. 
Angels desire to look into these things : the conversion of a 
sinner is joy throughout their ranks. Here in this remote 
sphere, things are doing and will be done which will tell on 
intelligences whose names and abodes will never reach our 
knowledge here. That fall of angels and men which free 
will made possible — that death among angels and men which 
the power of choice effected — may, working only by moral 
means, make in the glorious realm of freedom another fall 
and another death morally impossible. The loss of life to some, 
possible from their place in creation, just in the dealings of God's 
jurisprudence, may be pure unmitigated mercy to the greater 
number. The permission of evil — of evil leading to one sad 
result in death — may issue in another result, the eternal and 
undisturbed establishment of good. 



Note.— Thia and the following chapter have been much abridged, but the Author's 
language has been carefully retained. 

CHAPTER X. 

RISE OF THE THEORY OF ETERNAL LIFE IN HELL. 

It has been so often asserted that the theory of Augustine was 
the theory always held in the Christian Church, that our treatise 
would not be complete if we did not show that such was not the 
case. We wholly deny it. The doctrine of the Apostolic Church 
was on this question in perfect agreement with Scripture. We see 
this from those ' Epistles of the Apostolical Fathers ' which have 
been preserved to our time. From beginning to end of them 



54 Rise of the Theory of Eternal Life in HeU. 

there is not one word said of that immortality of the soul which 
is so prominent among the later fathers. Immortality is asserted 
by them to be peculiar to the redeemed. The punishment of the 
wicked is emphatically declared by them to be everlasting, and 
the fire which consumes them an unquenchable one ; but its 
issue is with them, as it is with Scripture, * destruction,' ' death,' 
'loss of life.' 1 So it was with many of the best of the Fathers 
immediately succeeding. It is quite true that some of these 
begin to speak in philosophic language of the immortality of the 
soul, but they explain it either as merely signifying a stronger 
vitality than was possessed by the body, or as an immortality 
that was alienable by sin. 2 But their teaching in its grand 
conclusion is agreeable to that of Scripture. They held that 
the immortality originally bestowed on man by God was for- 
feited by his sin, and is only restored through Jesus Christ. For 
all men they teach a bodily resurrection, but that of the just 
aloue do they allow to be to life everlasting. They hold that the 
righteous retribution due to sin, and not here visited on the 
sinner, shall be visited on him in hell according to his deserts. 
Wholly unconscious of Origen's later doctrine of the finite 
nature of future punishment, and the restoration of all sooner or 
later to God's favor, they maintain that the fire of hell is 
unquenchable, and its result to men and devils the utter and 
final loss of all being and existence. "When we name Justin 
Martyr, Theophilus of Antioch, Irenasus, and Clemens Alexan- 
drinus, as holding these opinions on future punishment, we have 
named the most learned, the holiest, and the soundest of the 
fathers immediately succeeding the apostolic age. 3 

At an early period, however, doctrine on this point began to 
be corrupted, and the corruption grew with a rapid growth. Of 
all the systems of philosophy in vogue at the time, the most sub- 
lime was that of Plato. Of a part of human nature, the soul, 
it took a very lofty and captivating view. It abandoned the 
body willingly and for ever to its dust, but it ascribed to 
the soul a life which should have no end. 

1 Apostolical Fathers, Antwerpiae, 1698. Clemens Rom. Fp. i. is. ; xxxv. : xxxix. : 
xiv. ; xxxv. ; liii. Martyrdom of Polycarp, adv. ; ii. ; xi. ; xix. ; Barnabas, xxi. ; xv. ; 
xx. ; x. ; xix. ; Ignatius ad Ephesios. xvi. : xix. ; xx. ; xviii. ; xvii. ; ad Magn. i. ; v. ; ri. ^ 
x. ; ad Iral. ii. ; iv. ; xi. ; ad Pol. ii. Hennas Past. B. i.— i. 1; iii. 8 t B. ii.— vu. ; xii. 1. ; 
B. ni.— vi. 2 ; viii. 6 ; ix. 26. 2 Justin Martyr, 498 A ; 81 D ; Irenaeus, lib. v. vii. Paris, 
1675. 8 Justin Martyr, 222 D ; 345B; 22-1B; 223C;58B: 264B; 196 C ; 167 D ; 327 D ; 
41 C ; 45 B : 66 C ; 87 B ; Theophilus Ant. 79 B : 114 D ; 74 C ; 103 B C D ; 104 A ; Iremeus 
adv. Hcer. Lut. Pans, 1675-50 C; 223 D: 224 A: 284 B; 389 C; 323 C; 386 D; 493 B. 
Clement of Alexandria. Edinburgh, Clark, 1868, vol. 1. pp. 191 ; 465; 87; 298; 170; 86; 
102; 190; 274. 



Primitive Truth. 55 

The reader of Scripture knows how earnestly and frequently 
Paul warned the Church against philosophy. 1 He is the only 
one of the Apostles who has especially done so, as he was proba- 
bly the only one of them who had any acquaintance with 
philosophical systems. In his warnings he does not make 
any exception. He does not condemn the Stoic or Epicurean 
schools, and exempt that of Plato, as some of the Fathers 
expressly affirm of him. 2 He prohibits with all the weight 
of his authority the introduction of any philosophical system or 
dogma into the Church. He warned that it would spoil and cor- 
rupt, not elevate or strengthen truth. 

Many of the early Fathers forgot this warning of the Apostle, 
and it is among these precisely that we find the origin of 
error in the Christian Church upon the great doctrine of future 
punishment. Educated in Platonism, they did not like to 
renounce it, and flattered themselves that they might, with 
great advantage to the cause of Christianity, bring at least 
a portion of their old learning into its service. Some brought 
less, some more, according as they were more or less thoroughly 
acquainted with Christianity. But on one point they were 
substantially agreed. . All of them, with Tertullian, adopted in 
the sense of Plato Plato's sentiment — ' Every soul is immor- 
taV^ On this point Plato took rank, not among prophets 
and apostles, but above all prophets and apostles. A doctrine 
which neither Old Testament nor New taught directly or 
indirectly, nay, which was contrary to a great part of the 
teaching of both, these Fathers brought in with them into 
the Church, and thus gave to the old Sage of the Academy 
a greater authority and a wider influence by far than he had 
ever attained or ever dreamed of attaining. It was in effect 
Plato teaching in the Church, under the supposed authority 
of Christ and his Apostles, doctrine subversive of, and contrary 
to, the doctrine which they had one and all maintained. This 
dogma of Plato was made the rigid rule for the interpretation of 
Scripture. "No Scripture, no matter what its language, could be 
interpreted in a sense inconsistent with Plato's theory. Christ, 
and Paul, and John, all were forced to Platonise. The deduction 
of reason, half doubted by Plato himself, was by these Plato- 
nising Fathers palmed off on men's minds as the teaching of 
revelation. 

i Col. ii. 8 ; 1 Cor. i. 22. 2 Clement of Alex. Ms. b. i. c. xl. 
a Tertullian cU Re*, iii. 327, 111. 



56 Rise of the Theory of Eternal Life in Hell. 

We have read the writings of the early Fathers on this 
question with carefulness. It is impossible of course to affix 
a date to a nameless forger, but we think it quite possible, if not 
probable, that the first known holder of the theory of eternal life 
for the reprobate was the author of the writings, known under 
the title of ' Clementina,' and falsely attributed to Clemens 
Romanus. It is indeed difficult, if not impossible, to ascertain 
the exact sentiments of this writer. If his work is not itself 
interpolated, he appears to hold directly opposite opinions in 
different parts of it. In one place he speaks of the soul as 
if it would at length be extinguished in the fire of hell; in 
another as if, from its essential immortality, its sufferings could 
have no end. 1 To our mind he seems to have lived at a period 
and a place where opinion was changing from the Apostolical to 
the Augustinian point of view, and that it is thus we are to 
account for his inconsistency. It is enough for our present 
purpose to note that he has fully adopted the lofty language of 
Plato on the nature of the human soul, and thus laid the 
sure foundation for that change of doctrine which he did not 
himself perhaps fully adopt. 2 This nameless forger is, so far 
as is known, the first maintainer of the doctrine of eternal 
life in hell. 

We do not know whether another early forgery, known^as 
4 The Recognitions ' of Clemens, and attributed by its writer 
to the friend of St. Paul, was written by the author of the 
'Clementina.' Here in these shameless forgeries and these 
vagaries of unhallowed fancy, lies the mean origin of a dogma 
which now overshadows the Christian Church. 

We now come to a man who has at least the recommendation' 
of having a name. We know his antecedents, and can form 
some fair opinion of what his judgment is worth. 5 He is Athen- 
ao-oras, who lived from about A. D. 127 to A. D. 190. f§;He was 
born at Athens; was educated there in the philosophy of Plato; 
became a Christian and settled at Alexandria, where his great 
object seems to have been to show that Christianity and 
Platonism were one and the same in substance. - Beyond a 
question, he held the doctrine of eternal life for the reprobate as 
it was afterwards elaborated by Augustine. 

While Athenagoras, the Platonist, is at Alexandria main- 
taining the novel doctrine of eternal life in hell, he has a worthy 

i Clementina, Antwerpiae, 1698. Horn. Ter. vi.; Horn. Undcc. xi. 
2 Horn. Decima cent, xvi. ; "Cndec. xi. 



Athenagoras. 5 7 

fellow-laborer in Mesopotamia in the person of Tatian, the 
Marcionite heretic. 

In Athenagoras, Tatian, and the writer of the spurious works 
attributed to Clemens Romanus, we have then the earliest 
known advocates of the theory of eternal life in hell. But this 
theory required a more powerful advocate than any of the above 
writers, and it found it somewhat later in the person of Ter- 
tullian. A master of the Latin tongue, a powerful reasoner 
when not led away by his peculiar errors, of a vehement nature 
•and a vivid imagination, he was well suited to impress an 
idea on an age disposed to accept it, and, spite of his heresies, 
spite of his strange hallucinations, he left the lasting impression of 
his mind upon the church of succeeding times. He uses to their 
utmost possible latitude of meaning most of Plato's terms for the 
soul. It is, even in the case of the wicked, not subject to death, 
but must ever continue immortal. It is ever indissoluble, 
indivisible, an eternal substance, having the very same immor- 
tality which belongs to Deity. 1 But it is in the description 
of the endless agony of the lost that Tertullian surpassed his 
predecessors and threw them into the shade. He does not draw 
any discreet veil over his scene of punishment. Without saying 
that he took a positive delight in the contemplation of it, he 
depicts its fancied circumstances with a minuteness and a force 
that have only been surpassed by the imagination of Dante, 
or the agonizing details of a Jesuit or a Redemptorist Preacher.2 
Nor can we say that he was wrong, if his theory were but true. 
No amount of terror, horror, disgust, that could possible be 
awakened here in the human mind could be too great, if only by 
it a single soul could be persuaded to fly in time from this 
wrath to come. The delicacy that tells us that there is such 
a hell, but that good manners, or regard for feeling, should lead 
us to conceal its naked and terrible aspect, is a false delicacy 
which risks eternity rather than give pain for a moment. Ter- 
tullian certainly was not guilty of this false delicacy. He 
believed in eternal torments, and he drew faithful pictures 
of them. With him hell was a scene where endless slaughtering 
(aeterna occisio) was being enacted, where the pain of dying was 
to be ever felt, but never the relief which death could bring, for 
death according to him could not enter into that region of 
endless life. 3 And God was the author and inflictor of this ! 
Let us look fairly and boldly at this. It was the root, 

1 269 ; 346 ; 281. ■ « History of European Morals.' W. E. H. Lecky, v. ii. p. 237. 3 364 D. 



5S Rise of the Theory of Eternal Life in HeUL 

and basis, and justification of the theory of OrigeD. N ; man 
can deny that God is able to destroy what He was able : 
create. Xo man can deny that God had a power to choose 
whether He wonld inflict death npon the sinner or an endless 
life of agony. Which wonld He choose — the gentler or the more 
fearful doom ? "Will yon say the latter ? Why ? There mnst 
be a reason. Is it to please Himself ? He repudiates wholly this 
kind of character 1 1 His mode of dealing here contradicts it ; 
where pain is sharp it is short. Is it to please his angelic or 
redeemed creation ? They are too like Himself to take pleasure 
in such a course. Did no pity visit the Creator's bosom, they 
would look up into his face and plead for mercy. Is it to terrify 
them from sin ? Would it ? What is sin ? Is it not pre-emi- 
nently alienation from God? What would alienate from Him. 
so completely as the sight or the knowledge of such a hell as Ter- 
tullian taught ? Pity, horror anguish, would invade every celes- 
tial breast. Just fancy a criminal with us. He has been a great 
criminal. Let him be the cruel murderer ; the base destroyer of 
woman's innocence and honor ■, the nendish trafficker in the market 
of lust ; the cold-blooded plotter for the widow's or the orphan's 
inheritance. Let him be the vilest of the vile, on whose head 
curses loud and deep have been heaped. He is taken by the 
hand of justice. All rejoice. He is put to death ! Xo. That 
is thought too light a punishment by the ruler of the land. He 
is put into a dungeon; deprived of all but the necessaries of 
existence ; tortured by day and by night ; guarded lest his own 
hand should rid him of a miserable life ; and this is to go on till 
nature thrusts within the prison bars an irresistible hand, and 
frees the wretch from his existence. Now what would be the 
effect upon the community of such a course ? The joy at 
the criminal's overthrow, once universal, would rapidly change 
into pity, into indignation, into horror, into the wild uprising of 
an outraged nation to rescue the miserable man from a tyrant, 
and to hurl the infamous abuser of law and power from his seat. 
And this is but the faintest image of what a cruel theology 
would have us to believe of God ! Nature steps in, in the 
one case, and :here shall be an end. Omnipotence in 

the other puts forth its might to stay all such escape. Tor ever 
and for ever / Millions of years of torment gone, and yet tor- 
ment no nearer to its close ! Not one, but myriads to snffer 
thus! Their endless crie^ ! Their ceaseless groans! Their 

JEaei., xriii. 2S. 



Rise of the Theory of Universal Restoration. 39 

interminable despair ! Why Heaven and Earth and Stars in 
their infinite number — all worlds that roll through the great 
Creator's space — would raise one universal shout of horror at 
such a course. Love for God would give way to hatred. 
Apostacy would no longer be partial but universal. All would 
stand aloof in irrepressible loathing from the tyrant on the 
throne, for a worse thing than Manichteism pictured would be 
seated there — the One Eternal Principle would he the Principle 
of Evil. 



CHAPTER XI. 

RISE OF THE THEORY OF UNIVERSAL RESTORATION. 

Not surely without reason did Paul warn against philosophy 
when the admission of one philosophical dogma led good men, 
under the specious pretext of exhibiting the Divine justice 
and holiness as infinite, to paint God as a monster of unutterable 
cruelty. We will now see the wisdom of the Apostle's warning 
in the result from this same source of another school of theology 
which, while freeing God's character from the charge of injustice 
or cruelty, would probably, if generally accepted, be in its imme- 
diate consequences in this world far more injurious to truth and 
godliness. No language can express too strongly our convic- 
tion of the danger as well as the error of this latter view. It 
gilds with seductive light the ways of sin. It would, we firmly 
believe, if commonly believed, in a single generation reduce the 
morals of the world to a level with those of Sodom. 

The fearful picture of God exhibited by Tertullian could not 
be laid in its bare horrors before the mind without drawing 
forth some protest. Origen came forward to utter the protesta- 
tion, and it assumed the form of ; Universal Restoration.' Tertul- 
lian had consigned reprobate men and devils to endless pain 
in hell : Origen converts hell into a vast purgatory, and sends 
men and devils forth from it purified and humbled to the feet of 
the Great Father and to the joys which are at His right hand for 
evermore. It is the old story of human thought — from one 
extreme to its opposite. The truth always lies between the two. 

Origen had seized hold of a Scriptural truth — the final 
extinction of evil — which was just as much a part of our 



&0 Rise of the Theory of Universal Restoration. 

Father's revelation as Tertullian's eternity of punishment. Each 
had his undoubted share of truth, and if the question lay 
between their two systems it could never be set at rest. If 
Tertullian could appeal to Scripture for the overthrow of the 
wicked, whether men or angels, as being of an endless nature, 
Origen could point from the same source to a blissful coming 
time when all that had breath should praise the Lord. 

What was there which prevented Origen from going back to 
the old Scriptural doctrine of death as the end of sinners, which 
places the two Scriptural truths just mentioned in harmony 
and not in opposition ? It was the very same human dogma 
of the immortality of the soul which had led Athenagoras 
and Tertullian to their endless life in hell. This dogma of 
Plato, this creation of human reason, this tradition of men, made 
the revolt from Tertullian to be only the exchange of one human 
system for another, instead of being a return from man's heresy 
to God's truth. 

But Origen, while he only became acquainted with the Hebrew 
language in his old age, was a Greek scholar from his youth. 
He had the advantage, which Augustine had not, of being 
thoroughly acquainted with the language in which the Gospel 
was inscribed. He knew the meaning of its terms, and that 
among the terms which described the future punishment of 
sinners who in this life rejected Christ were all the terms of the 
Greek language which describe the utter destruction of organiza- 
tion, the utter loss of life, being, an existence. What was to be 
done with these ? 

"Were they to be explained away ? That is what the holders 
of Augustine's theory have done. They put an insufficient, an 
inapposite, an unnatural, or a positively false meaning on the 
most important terms of the New Testament. With them death 
means life, and life means happiness, and so on. Having put 
these convenient meanings on the phraseology of Scripture, 
interpreted it as they would not dare to interpret the code of a 
human legislator, they can look placidly on a thousand passages 
which contradict what they teach from platform, and pulpit, and 
press, and instil into children's minds almost with their mother's 
milk. Origen could not, or would not, do this. He gives, as 
any Greek scholar not possessed with the spirit of Augustine 
would do, their proper force to the terms of the New Testament 
— the same meaning which Plato, or Euripides, or Demosthenes, 
or Cicero would attach to them. 



Origen. Gl 

•We will give an example of this. Every one is familiar with 
the solemn warning of our Lord, ' Fear not them which kill the 
body, but are not able to kill the soul : but rather fear Him who 
is able to destroy both body and soul in hell.' We remark in the 
English version the change from 'kill' in the first clause, to 
' destroy ' in the second, a change exactly answering to the 
Greek original, which uses (apokteino) in the first clause, and 
(apollumi) in the second. The maintainers of Augustine's theory 
attempt to take advantage of a change which is in reality only a 
heavier blow to their system. They explain ' destroy ' as a term 
of inferior force to ' kill.' Listen to Bengel, from whom better 
things might be expected. He tells us that the word ' destroy ' 
and not 'kill' is used when the soul is spoken of because ''the 
soul is immortal, i. e. cannot die. 1 Now any one who came 
unprejudiced to this passage of our Lord would acknowledge 
that every law of right reason would lead us to conclude 
that the force of the term in the second clause must at least 
equal that in the first, else the warning is diminished in its 
intensity. • Let us hear the Greek scholar Origen on the true 
force of this word ' destroy.' He is commenting on 1 Cor. iii. 9, 
in connection with Jer. i. 10 : 'See what is said to the people of 
God : Ye are God's husbandry, ye are God's building : therefore 
the words of God over nations and kingdoms are, To root out, and 
to throw down, and to destroy. If it be rooted out, and that 
which is rooted out be not destroyed / that ichich is thrown 
down still exists. It is therefore the result of God's goodness, 
after the rooting out to destroy ichat is rooted out, after the 
throwing down to destroy what is thrown down? Such is the 
mighty power which, Origen, a Greek scholar, gives to this word 
'destroy.' With him it means blotting out of all existence, 
obliterating the very form and appearance. It is thus even a 
stronger word than ' to kill.' Death, for a time at least, leaves 
the shape and parts unaltered ; destruction removes the organi- 
zation and resemblance altogether. 

But, it will be asked, if such be the true force of the words 
applied in Scripture to future punishment, how did Origen 
defend his theory of universal restoration with these meeting 
him in the face? Very easily. Origen never found any 
difficulty in Scripture. If it was for him, well and good. If it 
was against him, he made it without any ceremony speak as 
he wished. 

* Bengel on Matt. x. 28. 



62 



Rise of the Theory of Universal Restoration. 



Every reader of Scripture knows that its solemn warnings are 
addressed to the si?mer in person : i iciclced man, thou shalt 
surely die.'' Death, Destruction, Perdition, Loss of Life — all 
the multiplied phrases and illustrations of the Bible are there 
directed against the persons of the wicked. Origen' s simple 
mode of neutralizing their force is by directing them against 
their sin. And so his point is gained. Their force cannot be too 
strong for him, so he does not attempt to diminish it. The 
Augustinian, directing them correctly against the sinner, robs 
them of their meaning : Orisren directing: them against the 
sin, leaves them their proper sense. % Both pervert Scripture, and 
it is difficult to say against which the charge is the heaviest. 

"We meet with Origen's free and easy method of Scripture 
everywhere throughout his writings. 1 "Whatever be our opinion 
of Origen personally, of his learning, his brilliancy, even of the 
truth of much of his teaching, his teaching here places him 
among those prophets condemned by Ezekiel for ' strengthening 
the hands of the wicked, that he should not return from his 
wicked way, l>y promising him life? 

For the benefit of our readers we subjoin a table which 
will enable them at a glance to see the relative antiquity in the 
primitive Church of the three great theories of future punishment 
which are at this day maintained in the Christian Church. "We 
are perfectly aware that in the writings of one of the Fathers 
whom we claim for our view, viz : Justin Martyr, are passages 
which appear to rank him among the holders of Augustine's 
theory ; but we are prepared nevertheless to make good our 
claim to his support. In the accuracy of the table appended we 
fully believe : for its substantial truth we Ire ready to contend : 
and we challenge any gainsayer to controvert it. The dates 
given for the death of each Father are, of course, only vouched 
for as the most probable approximation to truth. Exactitude is 
now unattainable. 



Eternal Death. 




Eternal Life of Pain. 


Universal Ee 


storation. 


Died 


A. P. 


Died A. D. 




Died a.d. 


Barnabas 


90 


' 






Clemens Eomanus 


100 








Hernias . . . . 


104 


■ 






Ignatius Martyr 


107 


The Forgers of the 






Polycarp Martyr . 


147 


Clementina and 






•Justin Martyr" . 


164 


Recognition of Clement 






Theophilus of Antioeh . 


183 


Athenagoras . . . 190 




Irenaeus Martyr 


202 


Tatian . . . 200 




Clemens Alexandrinus 


21-2 


Tertullian ... 235 Origen 


. 853 



i Origen on Matt. x. 28, Eothomagi, 166S. 



Origen. 63 

From the foregoing table we see how comparatively late the 
theory of Augustine appears in the remains of patristic writing, 
while that of Origen is later still. That blank space between 
them and primitive truth is fatal to both. Of Origen we 
now take our leave. In one grand feature of his theory he com- 
mands our entire sympathy. He looked forward to the extinction 
of evil. His yearning for it was true, was but following out the 
judgment and reason as well as the longing of every right heart. 
We cannot look at evil — its hatefulness, its misery, its pollution, 
— and think that with such a God as ours this evil will be 
permitted to extend or to exist for ever. So thought Origen, 
and Scripture bears him out. But he erred most fatally as to the 
means. He left the plain words of Scripture to carry out 
a human tradition. The inalienable immortality of the soul was 
the ignis fatuus which led this brilliant thinker through depths 
and over heights which weary the imagination of common minds 
to follow him. It compelled him to promise life where God had 
threatened death. His theory no doubt is very captivating, very 
seductive, but it is false. It is destructive of the true nobility 
of that nature, a false idea of whose nobility led Origen into his 
error. To suppose that a responsible being, capable of good and 
evil, may deliberately choose the latter, and deliberately continue 
in it, and yet that God is bound in every instance to win or force 
back that responsible agent to the path of life which he had 
forsaken, is destructive of the quality which distinguishes the 
higher from the lower order of creation, viz : the freedom of their 
will. God says to those whom, in making capable of knowing 
Him He has made capable of sharing in his own immortality — 
1 You may and can choose evil, and with it death.' Origen says 
to them — ' You cannot, and you shall not : the evil you would 
choose shall be severed from you, do what you will : the good 
you would not have shall be forced upon you, struggle against it 
as you may.' He reduces the creature made to walk in the field 
of freedom to the creation regulated by the iron law of necessity. 



64 Conclusion. 



CHAPTER XII. 

CONCLUSION. 

It is very often objected to our view that it removes from 
the sinner all his dread of sin arising from its consequences. So- 
far from this being the case, we believe that our view, thoroughly- 
known, is more calculated to impress the sinner with salutary 
fear than the theory of Augustine. 

It has often been remarked that where a punishment felt to be 
excessive is threatened, — it wholly fails of its effect. The crimi- 
nal is satisfied that it will not be executed. It is thus with the 
theory of everlasting misery as a punishment for human sin. It 
is practically disbelieved. The sinner takes refuge from it in 
a thousand ways. The greater portion of the professing- 
Christian Church has adopted purgatory as an escape for them 
from this hell. Even for those who cannot accept a purgatory^ 
the vulgar notion of hell has no practical terrors. Even if they 
do not reject it altogether as a mere bugbear, they do not believe 
in it for themselves. A change of life, a word of penitence at the 
last, a sigh of sorrow for the past as the soul is leaving its taber- 
nacle, will surely avert from them a fate too terrible for a 
merciful God to inflict. And so the very transcendent terrors of 
the vulgar hell defeat the object of threatened penalty, for few,, 
if any, believe in its infliction on themselves. We will not be 
suspected of summoning an unfair witness when we summon the 
modern poet of Augustine's hell to testify the sinner's universal 
disbelief in it : — 

1 But say, believing in such woe to come, 
Such dreadful certainty of endless pain, 
Could beings of forecasting mould, as thou 
Entitlest men, deliberately walk on ? 
Thy tone of asking seems" to make reply, 
And rightly seems : they did not so believe. 
Not one.' 

(Pollock, ' Course of Time,' b. viii. 

Our theory is credible, and does not remove from the sinner 
the salutary dread of punishment. If, indeed, we taught that 
the first death was for him an eternal sleep, we confess that 
we would remove from his mind all dread of punishment. But 
we do no such thing. We affirm for the sinner a resurrection, a 



The Terrors of the Lord. G5 

judgment, a sentence to the realm of hell, where he will suffer 
the due reward for his deeds ere he. passes under the sad sentence 
of eternal death. Are there no terrors here ? Is there not here 
enough to terrify any soul whom mere fear may lead to fly from 
the wrath to come? And all this is credible. Here in God's 
world is pain : here in God's world is death ! The man of 
natural religion cannot object to finding pain and death in a life 
following this. We are but making the God of Nature and 
of Revelation one and the same Being ! And are they not one 
and the same ? We hold up before the human mind those 
' terrors of the Lord ' which Paul held up before the mind 
of Felix when he reasoned of 'judgment to come,' — that ' death ' 
which Paul declared would be the end of sin and of sinners, and 
which even such minds as that of Felix feel and acknowledge to 
be the worthy award of evil deeds. 1 

And nOw we bring our little work to its close. Its argument 
has led us to the most glorious hope and expectation which 
a being loving God can possibly entertain — the termination 
of moral evil. As it is a part of our Father's revelation 
that evil had an origin, so we rejoice to find it another part 
of that revelation that it will have an end. It is not from 
eternity, and it will not be to eternity. It is a thing of time; 
and is not an essential part of the constitution of the universe. 
The ages to come will roll on ignorant of evil, as were those 
former ages before the Archangel fell. Evil will be blotted out. 
All God's attributes, His mercy, His holiness, His justice, 
His power, are pledged to extirpate it. To do so is a necessity 
of that nature of His which has its own binding eternal laws 
within itself. Hell is not the eternal abode of evil, concentrated 
in intensity, deepening and darkening in hue throughout 
eternity. It is not the everlasting exhibition of a scene with 
whose moral horrors all the sensuality, and deviltry, and hate, 
and despair that has been exhibited in earth's foulest dens could 
not compare. The phrenzies of Bedlam, were earth one Bedlam ; 
the despair of suicide, were each one of earth's sons and 
daughters to resolve on rushing from a hatred life ; the hatred of 
the heart, were each heart to hate as Cain when he stood by 
Abel in the old field of murder, or the Dominican, as he glared 
with demoniac hatred 'on the martyr he was attending to the 
flames : all these could not exhibit even a feeble resemblance to 
that which hell would present if Augustine's view were true. 

S l Acts xxlv. 25 ■; Rom. i. 33. 



66 Conclusion. 

Thank God, it is not true. God does not contemplate this hell. 
He will indeed gather into it all things that offend — all the foul 
rakings of hate, and pride, and falsehood, and selfishness, and 
lust. But it is with the ominous purpose of Jehu, when he said, 
i Gather all the prophets of Baal, and all his priests ; let none be 
wanting,' and 'the house of Baal was full from one end to 
another.' So will hell enlarge her borders, and the evil of 
the universe shall descend into it, and fill its wide domain, to be 
extirpated and blotted out for ever. 

Such is the hell of Scripture, the very counterpart to that 
fearful scene which Augustine has depicted. The very thought 
of this latter is too horrible to think. However ancient, it is no 
part of 'the faith once delivered to the saints.' We therefore 
reject it as a fable, a novelty, a monstrous doctrine worthy of the 
Koran, where it takes its fitting place — unworthy of the Gospel, 
where it finds no place. We leave it to the disciple of Moham- 
med, lying on his couch of sensuality, to look down with cruel 
delight upon a scene of unutterable and endless misery. 1 This 
is not the consummation which the disciples of Christ, or the 
worshippers of the Father of mercies are called on to rejoice 
in. 2 They could not look on it and rejoice; they could not 
regard pain as endless without feeling that unalloyed joy could 
never be their own. 3 What they rejoice in is the destructio?i 
of the enemies of God, because in their destruction evil and 
misery are for ever banished from God's world, and God reigns 
supreme in the affection and the loyalty of all that breathe. 

From this standpoint we contemplate the final scene of 
retribution. There is heaven, and there is hell. There is eternal 
life, and there is eternal death. The redeemed enjoy the one ; 
the lost are the subjects of the other. The*Book of Revelation 
describes the latter — 'Death and Hades were cast into the 
lake of fire. This is the second death.' 4 All that has been, and 
continued to be evil ; the fallen angels who now move in earth 
and air; the spirits who are kept in chains of darkness; the 
multitudes who have died without God and without hope ; 
the multitudes whom the last day will find impenitent and 
unholy, have all been consigned to one common scene of punish- 
ment. According to their deserving is their chastisement. The 
time for each one's suffering over, he is "wrapped in the slumber 
of eternal death. Gradually life dies out in that fearful prison 

1 Koran, C. lxxxiii. 2 Psalm lviii. 10. 3 ; Victory of Divine Goodness, 1 T. R. Birks 
p. 179. 4-Eev.xx. 14. 



All Things New. G1 

until unbroken silence reigns throughout it. They who would 
not find life have found death. But the scene remains for ever. 
As Sodom and Gomorrha have exhibited to every succeeding 
generation of men the Divine vengeance upon full-blown iniquity, 
so will the charred and burnt-out furnace of hell afford its eternal 
lesson to the intelligences of the future. As angels wing their 
way from world to world, as the redeemed touch with fresh 
delight their harps of gold, as new orders of spiritual life 
are called into being, so the nature and end of sin are alwavs 
remembered in that scene where so many of the inhabitants 
of heaven and earth had bid an eternal farewell to the life of 
God which is so full of joy. That lesson of awe is read and 
pondered on by all. But it will be a lesson read without the 
shudder of anguish. They have drunk the waters of Lethe, ' the 
silent stream,' and forgotten long ago their misery. There is no 
eternal antagonism of good and evil, no eternal jarring of 
the notes of praise and wailing ; evil has died out, and with it 
sorrow; throughout God's world of life all is joy, and peace, and 
love. 



THE 



Duration and Nature 



OF 



Future Punishment 



BY 

HENRY CONSTABLE, A.M., 

3NDARY OF CORK. 



REPRINTED FROM THE SECOND LONDON EDITION. 



jS^ 



S NEW HAVEN, CONN. : 
CHARLES C. CHATFIELD & CO. 

1872. 



Barker's Chemistry. 



Prof. Barker's Chemistry was published Nov. ioth, 1870. In 
one year it has been introduced as a text-book in nearly every 
leading college in the country, and in most of the first-class 
seminaries. No text-book - has ever received such unqualified 
praise and such general endorsement by all the leading men of 
science in the country. The publishers would respectfully ask 
your attention to the following 

Opinions of Professors and the Press. 

Wholly in the spirit of the most advanced thought in science. — Prof. Wolcott 
Gibbs, Harvard University. 

An admirable book. . . The clearest exposition of the present condition of 
the subject. . . A great boon to teachers. — Prof. C. F. Chajidler, Ph.D., 
Columbia College, in A m. Chemist. 

I klfciw of no elementary text-book in the language which equals it in clear and 
succinct presentation of what has come to be called Modern Chemistry. — Prof. 
Peter Collier, Univ. of Vermont. 

I am fully of the opinion that for my college classes, this little work of Prof. 
Barker is the best introduction to the study of Elementary Chemistry. — Prof. J. P. 
Marshall, Tuffs College. 

It will take a foremost position as a text-book in our academies and colleges. — 
Samuel Fallows, Supt. of Public Instructioti in IVisconsin. 

It is the only perfectly satisfactory text-book of Chemistry that I have ever 
seen. — Prof. F. H. Bradley, East Tenn. University. 

It is decidedly the clearest and most satisfactory statement of the new Chemical 
theory which has yet appeared, and [ hardly know any other source from which so 
much information can be obtained in regard to modern Chemistry. — Prof. Thomas 
R. Pinchon, Trinity College, Hartford, Conn. 

The only thorough text-book in Chemistry we possess. — Prof T. R. Noyes, 
M.D., Oneida, N. Y. 

I have examined it with a good deal of care, and am highly pleased with it. Its 
clear and precise statements of chemical science recommend it as an educational 
work of the highest character. — Prof. Geo. H. Cook, Rutgers College, N. Y. 

I adopt it as our college text-book in preference to all others. — Noah K. Davis, 
President of Bethel College, Ky. 

It is a great improvement upon all other text-books now in use on the same 
subject. — Cyrtis Nutt, D.D., President Indiana State University. 

Its strict scientific method, its clear, condensed power of statement, and above 
all, its conformity at all points with the most recent improvements in the nomen- 
clature of the science, as well as w r ith the latest results of investigation, give it a 
decided advantage over previous text-books. As a manual to prepare the student 
for a course of lectures or for laboratory work, it can safely be recommended to all 
teachers of the science. — N. Y. Evening Post. 

A compact elementary text-book, the first in our language wherein " Modern 
Chemistry " is presented systematically. The style of the work is concise and 
animated, the illustrations are fresh, the typography is good, and it cannot fail of 
a hearty welcome among our teachers and learners. — America?i Jour, of Science. 

Experience with the book in teaching has more than confirmed the favorable 
impression which its first appearance gave. In point of clearness, conciseness 
and systematic arrangement, it is a model, and without a rival. — Prof. A. IV. 
iVright, Willia?ns College, Mass. 

A treatise which for thorough representation of modern rather than ancient 
ideas, for compactness of style and arrangement, and for clearness and accuracy 01 
definition is, we think, unsurpassed. — The N. Y. Medical Record. 

The most systematic and valuable work of its kind ever published in this 
country. — Waterbury {Conn.') A merican. 

Original in diction, lucid in statement, and fully up to the present state of the 
science. — Connectictd School Journal. 

We have never taken up any work of the kind which was so lucid in arrange- 
ment or more beautifully adapted to its purpose as a text-book. — Hartford {Conn.) 
C entrant. 

We are, after examination, prepared to give the book hearty commendation. It 
is admirably calculated to introduce beginners into the science of chemistry. — 
Scientific A merican. 

Altogether it is calculated to prove of the greatest possible service to students — 
New York Times. 



Opinions of President Porter's American Colleges and 
the American Pnblic. 

The great champion of American colleges is Prof. Porter of Yale 
College. . . . The best work ever published on this subject of 
collegiate education. — Springfield Republican. 

We wish the entire American public might read this treatise. It 
bears upon one of the most important questions relating to the fu- 
ture welfare of our country. — Churchman, Hartford, Conn. 

We lecommend this volume to every student and intelligent 
thinker. — N. Y. Observer. 

All men interested in the cause of education will welcome Prof. 
Porter's book as a valuable contribution toward the solution of the 
inquiry, How can the collegiate system be judiciously improved or 
changed? — A^ Y. Times. 

It is emphatically a book for the times, treating a subject of vital 
importance. — Central Baptist, St. Louis, Mo. x , 

I have read it with very deep interest. — Prest. McCosh, Princeton. 

An excellent and valuable work. — Prest. Cummings, Wesleyan. 

Able and just presentations of our colleges to the public. — Prest. 
Anderson, Rochester University. 

The discussion is not only very reasonable, but thorough, com- 
prehensive, and wise. — Prest. Brown, Hamilton College. 

An able and scholarly review of the system of instruction pursued 
in our American colleges. — Prof. Francis Boweu, Harvard. 



Opinions of Four Years at Yale. 

The book will be welcomed and read with great interest, by grad- 
uates, and by all indeed who desire an insight into life at this pop- 
ular and flourishing institution. — Boston Congregationalist, Aug. 17. 

It is a live book, and will interest thousands who never dwelt in 
the shades of Vale. — (St. Louis) Nat. Baptist, Aug. 10. 

It embodies a minute account of Vale as it exists to-day, and will 
be read by the curious with the sort of interest with which boys 
peruse Robinson Crusoe. * * * In style and manner it is read- 
able, piquant, and gossipping. — JV. Y. Home Journal, Sept. 6. 

His book as a whole is a painstaking and faithful performance of 
what it proposes to do, and will be read with great interest by all 
who are interested in college life in general, or that of Vale in par- 
ticular. — Worcester Gazette, Aug. 3. 

An impartial interest seems to actuate the author, and each reader 
must judge for himself where to accept with a little allowance. — 
Providence Her-ild, Aug. 4. 

An entertaining volume even for the multitude of readers, in the 
information it gives in regard to the general course of college affairs, 
and in the pictures it presents of the inner life of the undergrad- 
uate. — Prov. Journal. 

The book will not only prove fascinating to Yale men, but will be 
entertaining and instructive to readers in general — Boston Journal, 

J«?y 18. 

It is very carefully prepared, and marked by great industry and 
variety of detail. — Chicago Evening Post, July 29. 

For those going to Yale, or in fact to any college, the volume will 
be full of interest and value for the information contained, and the 
alumni will be interested by its recalling to their memory many 
incidents of college life which they had perhaps forgotten. — Cleve- 
land Flerald, July 29. 



PUBLICATIONS OF 

Charles C. Chatfield & Co. 



A TEXT-BOOK OF ELEMENTARY CHEMISTRY, Theoretical and Inorganic. 
By Prof. George F. Barker, M.D., Yale College. i2mo, 350 pp. Price, $1.75. 
One hundred new illustrations. 

THE AMERICAN COLLEGES AND THE AMERICAN PUBLIC. By Noah 
Porter, D.D., President of Yale College. i2mo, 275 pp. Price, $1.50. This book 
discusses every problem which has been brought before the American public during 
the past few years. 

FOUR YEARS AT YALE. By a Graduate of '69. i2tno, 728 pp. Price, $2.50. 
This is a complete and carefully-classified hand-book of facts relating to under- 
graduate life at one of the first colleges in America. 

SONGS OF YALE : A new collection of the Songs of Yale, with Music. Edited by 
Charles S. Elliot, Class of 1867. i6mo, 125 pp. Price in extra cloth, $1.00. 

SERVING OUR GENERATION and GOD'S GUIDANCE IN YOUTH: The 
Farewell and the Baccalaureate Sermons of Ex-President Woolsey. i2mo, cloth. 
Price, 75 cents. 

THE SCIENCE OF ESTHETICS ; or, the Nature, Kinds, Laws, and Uses of 
Beauty. By Henry N. Day, Author of " Logic," "Art of Discourse," "English 
Literature," etc. i2mo, 436 pp. Price, $2.25. 

LOGICAL PRAXIS : comprising a Summary of the Principles of Logical Science 
and Copious Exercises for Practical Application. By Henry N. Day, Author of 
" Elements of Logic,'' " Rhetoric," " Rhetorical Praxis," "^Esthetics," etc. 121110, 
147 pp. Price, $1.00. 

HOLY LAND, with Glimpses of Europe and Egypt. By S. D. Phelps. D.D., Author 
of" Poems for the Heart and Home," etc. i2mo, 408 pp. Price, $1.75. 

HALF HOURS WITH MODERN SCIENTISTS, comprising Lectures and Essays 
bv Profs. Huxley, Barker, Stirling, Cope, and Tyndall. 121110, 292 pp. Price, $1.50. 

HISTORICALS FOR THE YOUNG FOLKS. By Oro Noque. Price, $1.00. 

ROBINSON CRUSOE. Splendid Household Edition. i2mo, cloth. Price, $1.75. 

ELEMENTARY MUSIC READER. By K Jepson, Instructor of Vocal Music in 
the New Haven Public Schools. 8vo, 168 pp. Price, 60 cents. Old edition, 75 cents. 

NATURE AND DURATION OF FUTURE PUNISHMENT. By Henry Con- 
stable, A.M., Prebendary of Cork. Reprinted from the second London edition, 
with an Introduction by Prof. Charles L. Ives, M.D., of Yale College. . 8vo, 68 pp. 
Price, 40 cents. 

UNIVERSITY SCIENTIFIC SERIES. No. 1 — On the Physical Basis of Life. 
By Prof. Huxley. 25 cents. No. 2 — The Correlation of Vital and Physical 
Forces. By Prof. Barker. 25 cents. No. 3 — As Regards Protoplasm in Rela- 
tion to Prof. Huxley's Physical Basis of Life. By J. H. Stirling. 25 cents. 
No. 4 — On the Hypothesis of Evolution, Physical and Metaphysical. By Prof. 
Cope. 25 cents. No. 5 — Scientific Addresses. By Prof. Tyndall. 25 cents. 
No. 6 — Natural Selection as Aoplied to Man. By' A. R. Wallace. 25 cents. 
No. 7 — Spectrum Analysis : Three Lectures. By Profs. Roscoe, Muggins, and 
Lockyer. 2^ cents. Ten consecutive numbers sent by mail, $2.00. 



THE COLLEGE COURANT, per year, $4.00. 

THE YALE COURANT, per year, #2.00. 

THE CONNECTICUT SCHOOL JOURNAL, per year, $1.50. 



Any of the above sent postage paid on receipt of price by the Publishers. 



tf 

p 



c 









Sl>S 



5S»> 



! 



'.£> 









~,MMM 



1D% 



j>m 



JD2> 






I5JI 



Z2> D 



Deacidified using the Bookkeeper process. 
Neutralizing agent: Magnesium Oxide 
Treatment Date: August 2005 

PreservationTechnologies 

A WORLD LEADER IN PAPER PRESERVATION 

1 1 1 Thomson Park Drive 
Cranberry Township. PA 16066 
(724)779-2111 



)02 









so 



S3C1 



»r^nsi2ffi>® 



►iii' 






E3 

E££> 

DOT 



E> 3> >3 >3>yiT^fY 



^ " n~~v>^» 



